Re: make distcheck drops precious vars

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

Hi Ralf & Raph,

[Raphael came across the same issue recently.]

>>> "Ralf" == Ralf Corsepius <address@hidden> writes:

 Ralf> with automake-1.7.2, ""make distcheck" seems to drop
 Ralf> autoconf's precious vars.

This is unfortunate, and I do sympathize.  However it's not
clear that passing down precious variables is always the correct
thing to do.

For instance some Autoconf macros update these variables (for
instance adding flags such as -D, -I, -L, -l...), so we don't
know, at make time, what the original user value was.  Passing
the updated values seems troublesome.  Furthermore, some of
these flags may have been added conditionally by --with/enable
code, passing these down is undoubtedly wrong.

I believe it's better if distcheck runs a "vanilla" configure.
This helps testing a package in its default configuration,
regardless of the developer's configuration.

[...]

 Ralf> In my actual case, I need to set up CPPFLAGS to point to the include
 Ralf> directory of a prerequisite package outside of the compiler's default
 Ralf> search path. However, make distcheck drops CPPFLAGS :(

I know the feeling.  Fortunately there are a few workarounds:

1) make DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS=CPPFLAGS=-I... distcheck
2) config.site
3) export CPPFLAGS

HTH
-- 
Alexandre Duret-Lutz