Hi - While trying to get a reliable fedora-copr build of the git/master snapshot of elfutils, I ran into a problem that took me too long to figure out. I was running "make rpm" from an elfutils build tree, which involves running a "make dist" substep to produce a complete buildable source tarball (with all the autoconf* stuff included). Or rather, "complete" .... since the behaviour of "make dist" is itself dependent on the previous configure and thus the characteristics of the host.
On this particular host, I was testing json-c-devel-less debuginfod configuration recently, and didn't reinstall some library or other. When "make rpm" ran "make dist" on elfutils, the resulting tarball was NOT COMPLETE, because the doc/Makefile.am only conditionally adds some of the man pages. That might have been fine, if the machine on which the tarball/srpm would finally build were of the same configuration, but that's not the case. That one was a fully (json-c-devel) equipped box. So when the configure ran there, the make configury expected the doc/debuginfod.8 file in the sources, but it wasn't there. Build failed. A workaround this could be to unconditionalize all those "notrans" "dist" bits in doc/Makefile.am (and hope that the rest of the tree behaves). But I think the root cause is more the continued reliance on "make dist", made necessary by the exclusion of generated autoconf* materiel in the source tree. (In these SBOM days, a source tarball that crypto traceable to a git tag would also be welcome, but the current auto* exclusion policy does not enable that either.) Perhaps it's time to reconsider this policy. - FChE
