Re: [Automake-NG] [PATCH] [ng] maintainer-mode: remove it altogether

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 9 Aug 2012, Stefano Lattarini wrote:

> The best explanation for this move is given by excerpts from the
> Automake manual itself:

Complete removal of the AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro and option are not 
something I can agree with unless there is a work-around for other 
common uses.  The assumption seems to be that this mode is only used 
to control if autotools files are automatically re-generated.  This 
would be a wrong assumption based on actual practice.  Even if 
automake ignores maintainer mode for its own purposes, it should still 
be supported for other purposes.

My package uses maintainer mode for much more than gating autotools 
regeneration.  It uses it to block complex operations which require 
that particular tools be installed and configured correctly on the 
system.  For example, I use it to block rules for automatic generation 
of web pages and other documentation.  Indeed, even editing a C source 
file may cause documentation to be regenerated (as it does for my 
package).

There was nothing in the Automake manual which said that maintainer 
mode should not be used for more than gating autotools regeneration 
and it is the standard way to determine if maintainer-like activities 
should be supported.

The package maintainer carefully crafts his system to make sure that 
the appropriate tools are available.  Output which can not be tested 
is inspected to assure that it is ok.  The end-user who builds the 
software might have older, newer, or differently-configured tools 
which may or may not produce similar output to the generated files 
which were included in the tarball.  It is not reasonable for the 
configure script to be able to completely validate the user's 
environment.  A similarly named program might produce significantly 
different output or just be a similarly named program which does 
something completely different.

As an example, an OS distribution maintainer may want to patch the the 
project to fix a bug, but in the process, he might trash the project 
documentation because the available tool is configured differently or 
the wrong version.

I can attest that others on the several projects I help out on are 
bewildered by autotools and automatic maintainer rules.  Anything 
which diminishes this bewilderment and decreases risk helps.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/