Re: [changeset] Re: When do I need autogen and configure?

[John W. Eaton]

On 22-Feb-2009, Thorsten Meyer wrote:

| As it has been mentioned in another thread: here is an update of my
| changeset to  add make targets for the configuration (autogen,
| configure and Makefiles).  Compared to the older version, I moved
| the new targets below the all: target in order to prevent unwanted
| making of these targets.
| 
| I have this patch in my patch queue for quite a while now and it has
| not caused a problem yet.

I also checked in this changeset with a few additional changes.

First, I added

  AC_CONFIG_COMMANDS([Makefile], [if test "$ac_srcdir" != "."; then
    cp $srcdir/Makefile .
  fi])

to configure.in so that building in directory tree separate from the
source tree will work.  I didn't notice this problem until I had
already committed your previous patch.

Also, I fixed the rules for running autoconf and autoheader in
octMakefile.in so that they will work when building outside the source
tree:

  configure: configure.in $(M4_FILES)
          (cd $(top_srcdir); autoconf --force)
          (cd $(top_srcdir); autoheader --force)

These changes are not yet complete, because they don't handle the
configure script in the scripts directory, or any of the Makefiles in
the scripts subdirectory tree.

| However, I could not really test, if it
| does what it is indented for, namely, automatically rebuilding only
| those Makefiles etc. that need rebuilding: mercurial has the feature
| not to preserve timestamps, so with "hg qpush" after downloading new
| patches from the repository the timestamp of configure.in gets
| changed, and "make configfiles && make" will rebuild everything each
| time.

I'm not sure I understand the problem you are having, but I think you
should be able to touch files and set the timestamps so that you can
test these Make rules.

If you work on a similar change for the scripts directory, please try
to ensure that your change works when building in a directory tree
that is not the same as the source directory tree.

Thanks,

jwe