Re: When do I need autogen and configure?

[John W. Eaton]

On 25-Jan-2009, Thorsten Meyer wrote:

| It seems that configure always regenerates all Makefiles. I would like to try
| and change the part of configure that generates Makefiles out of Makefiles.in
| such that it only does so when the corresponding Makefile.in has changed. Can
| somebody point to the right place in the code?

AFAIK, there is no portable way to test file timestamps in a shell
script, and anyway, the configure script is probably the wrong place
for that logic.  It should probably go in the Makefiles.  But some of
us don't want make to run autoconf/autoheader/configure automatically
by default, so I would want a way to disable that feature if it were
added to the build system.

If all that changes is a Makefile.in file, you can use a command like

  ./config.status src/Makefile

to update a single file.

jwe