Re: Still unable to build trunk

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/24/11 10:14, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I thought something like "autoreconf -I m4"
> was needed to build successfully after synchronizing with the
> repository, if my last synchronization was before the import from
> gnulib.  If that's not true, are you saying that just "./configure"
> should be enough?

Yes, it should be enough, unless the commit was busted (or unless
I'm missing something, which is quite plausible since I don't know bzr well).
Here I'm assuming that someone else (who had up-to-date autotools)
did a 'make sync-from-gnulib' and then committed the result.

When you resynchronize from the repository, you should get not only
the hand-maintained source files (such as 'configure.in'); you should
also get the automatically-generated files (such as 'configure'), and
their time stamps should be no earlier than those of the source files.

If you are using HP-UX 'make' you might have trouble, since it
violates POSIX and considers a destination to be out-of-date if
its time stamp is the same as the source.  But the workaround
is simple: use GNU 'make' if you're on HP-UX, which you should
be doing anyway for other reasons if you're a maintainer.


> Any other issues that make the curve steep?

Well, you asked.  :-)  Sure, another thing that makes it
hard for newbies is that there's no web site to browse the
sources and their histories.  There is
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git>, but it's
the history filtered through git, which is not the same
thing.  When I visit the latest version of the log for
the master, for example, I'm usually missing the last
few versions, and I often see two or more copies of a
particular change, due to the way that bzr is mirrored
into git.  It's pretty confusing.

Let me give you another example of something I did wrong.
I did my first checkin using 'git'.  (I didn't know bzr
was the only way to install changes.)  After a few hours
the checkin vanished.  There was no explanation or diagnostic.
OK, OK, so I did something stupid, but I was a *newbie*,
and it's a natural newbie mistake: the system should do
a better job of telling me what's going on.