RE: calling autoreconf and minimizing rebuilds

[David Byron]

On Thursday, September 7, 2006 @ 10:09a, Ralf Wildenheus wrote: 

> You could just invoke a different rule then, or something like
>   make AUTORECONFFLAGS=--force
> 
> (and put $(AUTORECONFFLAGS) in your rule).  Surely that
> still requires you to know just _when_ the system's
> autotools were upgraded.  Not always easy to find out,
> with automatic package updates and the like...  but then
> again, autotools really do expect that you do consciously
> upgrade in your packages (e.g., read the NEWS entries of
> the upgraded tools).

You're right.  As well, I think I only need to run autoreconf once to create the
configure script.  Once I've run the configure script, I depend on the generated
Makefile to "do the right thing".

If this is true, it doesn't matter whether I run autoreconf with -fvi or just
-vi.

Seems like my helper Makefile would be more helpful if I ran autoreconf -vi just
before executing make even if the Makefile has already been generated.  I'm not
sure what this accomplishes, but it'd be a good place to add AUTORECONFFLAGS to
handle autotools upgrades.

Thoughts?

-DB