Re: make dist improvements

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Behdad,

unfortunately I'm still not fully through.  I hate to send replies in
bits, but it's also bad if the delay is unnecessarily long.  So here
we go with more bits:

* Behdad Esfahbod wrote on Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 11:14:46PM CEST:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > * Behdad Esfahbod wrote on Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 01:22:54AM CEST:
> >> Also may be a good idea to instruct tar to not record uid of the user 
> >> making
> >> the tarball?
> > 
> > Is there any way of doing that portably?  Otherwise, the only choice I
> > see is to factorize and do it for GNU tar only.
> 
> Not that I know of.  I can't even find how to do that with GNU tar.

 --owner=0 --group=0

You could make a custom rule and exploit TAR_OPTIONS:

my-dist:
        env TAR_OPTIONS="--owner=0 --group=0" $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) dist

> But
> making tar understand some env var like the GZIP=--best automake already does
> sounds easy enough, even if it only produces results in a few years. :)

You can override AMTAR (used by automake's rule for the v7 format), but
TAR_OPTIONS has been part of GNU tar's interface since Ocrober 2000.

Haven't looked at the rest yet, sorry.

Cheers,
Ralf