Re: Automake violations of the gnu coding conventions

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Richard,

* K. Richard Pixley wrote on Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 05:18:27AM CEST:
>
> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE is good to know about, thank you.  But it doesn't really 
> solve the problem for users.  Now if generated makefiles could have those 
> rules turned off using a command line and/or environment variable, that 
> might be useful.  Then we could build packages without automake, so long as 
> we had AM_MAINTAINER_MODE=no in our environment.  But again, I'd argue that 
> it was the maintainers who should set the variable and that the default 
> should be no dependency on automake.

Others have already argued it, but once again: if you have an extracted
tarball of a package that uses Automake, and building it causes automake
(or autoconf, or aclocal) to be run, then there very very likely a bug
in one of:
- the package's Makefile.am files
- the way packaging was done
- or the time stamps were messed up along the way.

This holds independently of the whole AM_MAINTAINER_MODE thingy.  And if
all steps are done right, then the basis of this whole thread becomes a
non-issue.

There is no way that Automake can avoid relying on time stamps, as it's
'make' that relies on them, and Automake relies on 'make'.

If you have a counter example to above, please show how to reproduce it.
Thank you.

> Of course, you can't do the conditional thing easily without resorting to 
> GNU make extensions, so we'd likely lose the ability to build with a v7 
> make program.

Automake conditionals are implemented in a way that they work with a v7
make program.  They do not use a GNU make extension.  The limitation is
that the decision is done at the time the conversion from Makefile.in to
Makefile is done, rather than only at 'make' invocation time.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf