Re: make dist depending on binaries which use gnulib

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Reuben,

* Reuben Thomas wrote on Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 03:22:08PM CEST:
> it has just been pointed out to me that "make dist" for current head
> of GNU Zile fails, unless preceded by "make". This is because make
> dist distributes a file which can only be made once the zile binary
> has been built.
> 
> I have two questions:
> 
> 1. Is it expected that "make dist" should work without a preceding
> "make"? i.e. is this really a bug?

The GNU Coding Standards usually only set requirements upon the behavior
of your build system *when run from an extracted tarball*.  This is
crucial for being able to build from a readonly medium: imagine an
extracted tarball on a CD or (more likely) on a readonly or shared
mount.  Then the use should be able to run configure in a temporary
directory and build without an error, nor with race conditions when
building in parallel in different build trees.

Cheers,
Ralf