[sane-devel] Autotools generated files and CVS

[Chris Bagwell]

Julien BLACHE wrote:
>> autofoo one has to know.  As for the amount of pain involved, I can
>> only think of the time it takes.  Julien mentions versioning issues
>> and broken deployment but I have little experience with that.
>>     
>
> You obviously never had to work with broken libtool versions, which is
> about every libtool version until something like 3 years ago, and even
> then, there have been some pretty broken versions after that too.
>
> If going with automake means we have to put up with the maintainer
> mode crap and bootstrapping the build system after every pull, then
> thanks, but no thanks, I'm keeping the current one.
>
> JB
So I think its safe to say that you've had some sort of bad experience 
with some part of the autofoo chain in the past and have settle on 
current method as comfortable.  Thats more then fair enough and a reason 
to stick with current approach.  This is ultimately my reason to bring 
it up in first place so that I understand the developers preference.

I'd like to be clear on one point.  The issues we've discussed are 
common to using any autofoo products and are a concern with or without 
automake being added.   In fact, the issues I've personally experience 
have never fallen in automake's areas... Issues were with either 
autoconf or libtool.

You've mentioned automake maintainer mode a few times to resolve 
issues... I'd like to understand the exact issue if thats possible so I 
can try to resolve it up front.  Was it ultimately the well documented 
issue with CVS timestamps and enablity of even running autoreconf to 
generate the correct updates to various generated files when running 
different versions of autotools?

My suggestion of removing generated files is based on my experience.  It 
happens that in my experience it was a royal pain until I both made sure 
maintainer mode was ON (the default) and removed generated files from CVS. 

I suspect the other approach (checking in generated files and turning 
off maintainer mode) doesn't really help solve any issues with mixed 
autotools versions but isolates the issue to key people that tend to 
maintain the configure and makefile frameworks.  In otherwords, the ones 
that understand how to run "autoreconf --force -install" and then back 
out the bad things it does.

I think for the most part, we are all agreeing on core issues. 

- Libtool is a big concern and should be in CVS to reduce issues. 
- Need a bootstrapping solution to recover from "autoreconf --force 
--install" to aid distributions.
- Don't want to tax all developers with autofoo issues. 

I don't think bootstrapping is taxing developers myself but I know 
plenty of people that feel otherwise.  So we will proceed with current 
approach of checking generated files in. 

We may need to further explore Olaf's suggestion of defining acceptable 
autotools versions to use for CVS submissions at some point.  But it 
sounds like you guess haven't had much of issues with autoconf so far so 
perhaps it will continue to not be a problem in the future.

Chris