[Freeciv-Dev] how to check whether ./configure needs to be rebuilt (was: CVS doesn't compile)

[Reinier Post <rp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jun 29, 2002 at 01:36:50AM -0400, Jason Short wrote:
> Per I Mathisen wrote:
> 
> > But there another issue: "make" doesn't know when to require another
> > ./autogen.sh run. I think "make" / "make all" should read some kind of
> > flag/counter to see if we need to rerun ./autogen.sh and abort, and have
> > "make anyway" as a way to override this test. I am not sure how to
> > implement this in a sane way, though.
> 
> I think this is conceptually wrong; autogen.sh is supposed to be a 
> "developer" tool that isn't present in the final distribution.  From a 
> practical standpoint, running "make dist" should give you a tarball that 
> has the configure script and no autogen.sh, so checking for dependencies 
> at this stage will not be useful.

Yes, it should happen before autogen.sh is run.
 
> The idea of a "make configure" doesn't seem workable either.  In this 
> case the rules for "make configure" will be present in the distribution 
> even though they wouldn't work, but so long as nobody ran it this 
> wouldn't be a problem.  However, there would still be problems.  For 
> one, "make configure" isn't any more automatic than ./autogen.sh, it's 
> just faster.  Also (and more problematic), the behavior of "make 
> configure" is created from the Makefile.am files after running automake 
> && autoconf && ./configure, so if changes are made (say, an added file) 
> "make configure" wouldn't know about it anyway until autogen.sh is run.

OK, the idea if 'make configure' seemed to imply that the check would
only happen after ./configure has already run, which would be silly.
This would be a different Makefile, that describes whether or not
./autogen.sh needs to be rerun, and doesn't need to do anything else.
It seems to me that the dependency checks Makefiles support are exactly
what is needed here, namely, comparing the mtime of ./configure with that
of other files in the Freeciv distribution.  All the checking once
it is decided that ./configure needs a rebuild is already performed in
./autogen.sh itself.

> The only thing that seems workable is to add dependency checking 
> directly into autogen.sh.  However this is way more work than it's worth 
> (dependencies would have to be checked on *everything* to be useful).

I don't think so.  If the user doesn't have automake, or the wrong version
of it, ./configure can still be up to date, and there is no harm in
leaving it as it is.

> jason

-- 
Reinier