[changeset] Re: When do I need autogen and configure?

[John W. Eaton]

On 30-Jan-2009, Thorsten Meyer wrote:

| A few questions:
|  - Would such a change to the build system be acceptable?

I don't see why not, especially if it is optional.

| Please note, that I
| have not added the target "configfiles" to the dependencies of the target 
"all".
| This way everybody can decide for himself if he wants to use this mechanism.

OK.

|  - What I don't like yet about the patch is, that I hardcoded the list of
| configuration files into the makefile sources (octMakefile.in and
| scripts/Makefile.in). I would rather copy them automatically from their 
original
| source in configure.in. Is there an easy way to do that?

Running

  ./config.status --help

prints them out with some other info.  You could get just the list with

  ./config.status --help \
    | awk '/^Configuration files:/ { getline; print $0; exit 0; }'

But since it is possible for config (and header files) to be generated
from something other than the corresponding .in file, it might be
useful if the config.status file provided some way of printing out a
list of these file pairs like

  ./config.status --list-config-files
  Makefile:Makefile.in
  foo:bar

or

  ./config.status --list-header-files
  config.h:config.h.in

so that these pairs could be passed directly to config.status with the
--file or --header option.  Maybe a change like that would be accepted
by the autoconf maintainers?

In your patch, configfiles is not a file target, so shouldn't it be
tagged as .PHONY?

jwe