[Gnu-arch-users] File time stamp preservation

[Parker, Ron]

I have a multiproject config that pulls a bunch of stuff together.  One of
the sub-projects is an auto* managed project.  I had to make a change to
Makefile.am and reconfigure.  Unfortunately my main machine did not have the
right (old) version of auto* and I didn't really want to upgrade this
applications *.{in,am,ac} files to the newer versions of auto*.

So I autoreconf'd on a machine that did have the old version and then
everything built fine.  Next, I committed my changes and did a fresh
build-config to test things.  When I configure && make the system attempts
to re-configure that subproject during its make phase.

It appears that tla does not preserve file times and I am certainly not
arguing that is should.  I understand some of the issues related to file
time preservation in a distributed source management system, but this makes
it ugly for anyone that tries to build this project on their machine.  They
must have multiple versions of auto*.

My question is what I a good way to handle this so that anyone that may
check this project out later will not need an ancient version of auto* and
so that files are not blindly retouched when they may actually be out of
date?