Re: A better autogen.sh

[Glenn Morris]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> What would you or other maintainers say if I suggested a change that
> would require them to log in to a remote system each time they wanted
> to build the latest trunk, generate some file there, then copy it to
> their local machine?  How can a member of a team even suggest
> something like that to another member?

If I try to put myself in the position of someone maintaining an MS port
of GNU software, I honestly don't think I'd mind needing to access a GNU
host once in a while. That's why I suggested it, I was trying to help.

>> It's ugly because then everybody has a src/config.in file that appears
>> to be locally modified all the time.
>
> I don't see why it will appear modified, if its content is identical.
> bzr is smart enough to not flag such files as modified.  Or am I
> missing something?

It's only identical if everyone uses exactly the same version of
autoconf. On reflection, Paul is also right that src/config.in should be
generated with the same version of autoconf as configure, so removing
one but not the other is not a good idea.

> I rather hope this will not the way, because it _is_ unreasonable,
> both in practical terms and in its underlying attitude, which frankly
> is revolting.

Am I allowed to get annoyed at this point?

>> If it were me, I'd keep the same version of autoconf installed. I'd run
>> it periodically and diff the generated src/config.in against
>> msdos/config.in. If there was a difference, I'd copy the former to the
>> latter and commit it.

I also volunteer to set up a cron job that does this. (I actually had
that in there to start with, then I took it out.)