[Protux-devel] Change of autoconf strategy in CVS

[Martin Herren]

Hej,

i already posted something about this issue begining of the year, but didn't 
get any reply. I'd like to RFC before making the change.

After endless researches i finally arrived at the conclusion that CVS and 
autotools are not made for each other (and finally understood the lambda nature 
of ./configure which resulted in so many strange errors)... and thus it will 
always be necessary to have the correct version of the autotools installed in 
order to compile the CVS version.
The problem are the timestamps (file modification date/time), which are not 
preserved by CVS. Thus autotools need to be rerun in order to be sure that all 
dependencies are met.

Due to that i think about to remove most of the autostuff files from CVS, just 
leaving the configure.ac, all the Makefile.am and the acinclude.ac only...
This forces everyone who uses CVS to have autotools in the correct version 
installed (or a compatible version, as there is more than just one working 
;-)...
But currently you already need it... so this won't change anything.

So removing most autotool files won't change anything from the user point, but 
will prevent having CVS conflicts in configure and Makefile.in as we often have 
now... which result in broken ./configure scripts and strange errors as we have 
seen too often.

Just a note about releases, once libmustux/protux has been built succesffully 
(you can run make without it rerunning autotools), all timestamps are correct, 
so it's possible to make a distribution tarball

_without_the_end_user_needing_to_have_autotools_installed_ !!!

(tar files preserve timestamps ;-)


So i think that's an important point which should be done, but i'd like 
feedback (Luciano ?) before doing it.

/Martin

PS: Sorry that it took that long to understand the problem... but on the net 
you'll find plenty of people with the same problem, and not many answers ! And 
this explains also why most project don't have the (unnecessary) autotools 
files in CVS !

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