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

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 9 Aug 2012, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> >
> That's why the files generated by maintainer tools should be distributed.
> Once they are, and the distribution tarball gets not botched somehow, the
> rules requiring such maintainer tools should not be executed on the use
> machine anyway, independently from the presence or absence of maintainer
> mode.

There are some broken (but popular) filesystems where make may want to 
re-build some files after extracting a distribution tarball.  This can 
also happen if a network is involved and the client and server times 
are not precisely identical. Some versions of GNU make may decide to 
rebuild some files.

> > I can attest that others on the several projects I help out on are
> > bewildered by autotools and automatic maintainer rules.
> How so?

One thing which bewilders them is that the "latest" release of 
autoconf, automake, and libtool provided by their OS distribution 
differs substantially from the FSF latest versions, and that even when 
the same versions (as reported by the OS distribution package manager) 
are used, there are still behavioral and file content differences 
because the OS distribution maintainers modified some files.

There is confusion on the project when the several people working on 
the project are all using different releases of autotools.  These same 
people also work on other projects, which are using different releases 
of autotools.

Lastly, there are people working on projects which use autotools, but 
those people are not using autotools (there can be several different 
build mechanisms for the same project).

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