Re: GNUMakefile: don't fail if there is no .tarball-version

[Simon Josefsson]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <simon <at> josefsson.org> writes:
>
>> > The 'gnumakefile' in particular does not provide functionality to the user
>> > of the package, only to the maintainer. It does not change the way "make" 
> and
>> > "make check" work. It has no test suite. Therefore it doesn't make much 
> sense
>> > to include it in --create-testdir.
>> 
>> It seems the patch isn't enough, the infloop still happens.  The reason
>> seems to be that maintainer-makefile is not filtered out, and it depends
>> on gnumakefile.
>
> Does it help if you change Bruno's patch to filter on git-version-gen, rather 
> than on gnumakefile?

Yes, the code in GNUmakefile first tests if git-version-gen is there
before proceeding, so it would solve it.  That may be a cleaner fix than
filtering out gnumakefile.

>> I'm not sure these gnulib-tool hacks are the right solution though.  It
>> seems to me like it would be useful to make GNUmakefile more robust, and
>> having it fail more gracefully when a .tarball-version file is missing.
>> But I don't care strongly about it.
>
> Again, it is not GNUmakefile that is wrong, it is the fact that you are 
> including git-version-gen but violating the requirements of git-version-gen.  
> It is only when build-aux/git-version-gen exists that GNUmakefile then 
> expects 
> that you are either in a VCS tree or that .tarball-version exists.

I'm just running 'gnulib-tool --create-testdir --with-tests --dir=foo'
which I think should be robust regardless of what quirks specific
modules have.

/Simon