Re: Annoyingly cautious make rules

[Andreas Schwab]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

> On 12/02/11 16:34, Andreas Schwab wrote:
>> you must rerun configure anyway when it changes, not matter how you
>> update it.  This has nothing to do with maintainer mode.
>
> Yes, and that was the point I was trying to make (evidently I was
> not clear enough): the main 2011-03-20 changes are independent of
> maintainer mode, and these changes do not motivate making
> maintainer mode the default for ordinary builds.

I don't understand.  It is vital that configure is up-to-date
wrt. configure.in.  That's what the rule does, nothing more, nothing
less.  Before the change, the committer of configure.in had to commit
configure as well, to keep it updated.  Now this is done by make the
next time it is run.  The outcome is exactly the same, except that now
you are guaranteed that configure is up-to-date wrt. configure.in,
whereas before that change you were dependent on the one who changed
configure.in (who often didn't update configure as well, and also caused
a lot of version churn do to different autoconf versions).  So the
current situation is a overall win, but it didn't really change in a
substantial way.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, address@hidden
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