"K. Richard Pixley" wrote: > even be interested in regenerationg Makefile.in's automagically. As is, > typical builders, (ie, not maintainers), are required to install > automake in order to build packages requiring automake.
I think you're generalizing this to a degree that's not the case. Most users that build from source do so from a tarball, and since tar preserves timestamps they should be correct and the user won't need developer tools regardless. Many, if not all, of the GNU packages that do store generated files in version already use this option and thus don't require any developer tools. Examples: gcc, binutils, gdb/insight, and the entire sourceware tree. The remaining GNU packages that don't store generated files in version control by definition require developer tools to build from CVS, so the option is irrelevent here as well, since again a tarball has the required timestamps. Examples: libtool, m4, coreutils. When you eliminate all of the above you're down to a very limited portion of use cases, and if installing developer tools is not an option then the problem can be solved by simply using a tarball, using cp -p, find | xargs touch, etc. > really solve the problem for users. Now if generated makefiles could > have those rules turned off using a command line and/or environment > variable, that might be useful. Then we could build packages without > automake, so long as we had AM_MAINTAINER_MODE=no in our environment. > But again, I'd argue that it was the maintainers who should set the > variable and that the default should be no dependency on automake. --disable-maintainer-mode ought to work, but I haven't tried it. Brian
