Re: [ft-devel] ft2build.h being regenerated each time.

[Samuel Williams]

Well, according to the man page "-c" is the default and not required at least for GNU install. I'm not familiar with what packages use as a default typically. Freetype is not the only package with this behaviour. However, just because it is the default behaviour doesn't mean that it is desirable behaviour. It makes sense to me that if file's contents are not changing, that the mtime is not modified either. Essentially that is what -C does, it doesn't copy the file if it already exists and has identical content. Whether or not this is expected behaviour or not is something you'd have to decide for your own project. However, at least in the case discussed above, it has undesirable behaviour. I have noticed similar behaviour from libpng, but I'm also planning to switch to CMake for building libpng, I wonder if it has the same issue or not?

On 5 April 2013 19:17, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> I build and install freetype into a local prefix for several
> platforms including darwin-osx and darwin-ios.  These files then get
> used by other libraries.  Those libraries track dependencies and if
> that file has a new mtime, it assumes that the file has been
> changed. When running a full build, all dependencies are also built
> in order which includes freetype.  Freetype copies files with no
> regard for preserving mtime, and thus other packages which depend on
> that file assume it has changed.

OK.  For such a use-case, the INSTALL environment variable seems to be
the right thing.  BTW, is there *any* GNU package or something based
on autoconf and/or automake which uses -C by default?


    Werner