Re: "make dist" calls "autoheader" ? duh...

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

>>> "gd" == Guido Draheim <address@hidden> writes:

 gd> As many of us, I use an extra prefix for the latest in autotools
 gd> development. To remake, I just switch the PATH, so that the latest
 gd> in autoconf/automake/libtool etc is found, including its autoheader.

 gd> After that, I did want to "configure && make" for the standard system,
 gd> and I did like to package the stuff using "make dist". This one fails
 gd> with a call to "autoheader" that says "configure.in not found". WELL,

[...]

 gd> I did now try for hours to get an idea *why* "make dist" wants to
 gd> remake config.h.in, but I just don't know. Has anyone an idea?

I think that's because when you reconfigure your project and run
aclocal it will always overwrite aclocal.m4.  So you end up
having aclocal.m4 which is newer than stamp.h.in, and this
triggers the autoheader rule.  

Actually, the first build after each run of aclocal will trigger
this (in your story that would be `make', not `make dist', so
maybe I'm commenting something else :)).

So you should probably make a dummy build with your devel-PATH
right after any reconfiguration (to make sure all timestamps are
ok), and only then attempt to remove automake from your PATH.

[...]

 gd> to go a few rounds calling with "make dist AUTOHEADER=false" in old'
 gd> system mode, may be you can see it too.

BTW, maybe you will want to use a my-distcheck target that make
a build with all AUTO* variable to false (like what is done in
fileutils) to make sure your users won't ever get such an error.

[...]

-- 
Alexandre Duret-Lutz