svn copy conflicts with autotools ?

[Eric PAIRE]

Hi all,

Here is the description of a problem met with subversion and autotools.
If anybody has a clean solution, let me/us know:

1) I have a project using the autotools for the environment management.
2) The project compiles without any problem in the 'trunk' directory.
3) I have set up a tag with 'svn copy' so that the tagged version is the 
exact
   copy of the version in the 'trunk' directory.
4) Another user gets the tagged version with a 'svn co' and runs 'configure'
   on it. And now ...

The problem is that all the dates of the checked out files have been 
modified,
and when running 'make', the first thing run is 'autoconf' and 
'automake', thus
modifying source directory files (configure, ...). It was even worst in 
our case, as
the autotools installed on the machine were too old and 'make' stopped 
without
having built anything :-( :-( The result is that checking out a tagged 
version may
lead to an unusable source tree (at least a tree needing some source 
file modifications).

This is the reason why I don't think it is a good thing that the 
subversion philosophy
of timestamps conflicts with autotools one. I am looking for a solution 
that would
allow a checkout to avoid rebuilding source files when not necessary. 
Timestamps
need to be preserved somewhat, and I think that the way subversion 
manages currently
timestamps should be coherent with autotools (or autotools should be 
modified to
handle subversion philosophy), and in particular when doing a 'svn copy'.

Thanks for your comments (and your solutions),
Eric PAIRE