Re: why automake command-line options were low in precedence

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Stefano Lattarini wrote on Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 11:55:14AM CET:
> In short: most automake command-line options are an historical
> accident, and (in the longish term) they should be treated as
> such IMHO.
> 
> To summarize once again: if automake is finally changed to have
> cmdline options take precedence over all other options, then the
> use of cmdline options should be only a mean for *temporarily*
> overriding the "proper" options, either for experimentation or
> debugging.  Do not expect them to play nice with rebuild rules,
> period.

Have you checked how many of Automake's own tests would currently fail
with this?  I'm afraid there would be quite a few.

It is pretty unintuitive when the outcome of a build depends on relative
time stamps.  I'm not sure how to fix this here though.

With buggy HP-UX make, the above semantics cannot be realized, unless
automake is changed to take at least a second (by sleeping or so), as
`make' may trigger rebuilding Makefile.in even if Makefile.am and
Makefile.in have the same time stamp.  :-/

What a rats' nest!

Cheers,
Ralf