On Feb 21, 2022, at 16:32, Jim DeLaHunt wrote:
> But I also thought, why not also patch the m4 macros which generate the
> configure script? It keeps the codebase on the user's machine consistent. It
> keeps the patches in the MacPorts repository. What harm could it do?
>
> I'm glad you asked that! It turns out that this codebase's Makefile includes
> rules to rerun aclocal, autoconf, and automake if any of the m4
> macro files are newer than aclocal.m4, or configure, or config.status,
> or a few other files. When the Portfile patches these m4 scripts, it
> updates their modification times to the present, which is newer than
> aclocal.m4. Thus at build time, the Makefile attempts to perform the
> configuration phase all over again. port -t (trace mode) exposes that
> this adds dependencies on those autotools.
>
> I worked around this by adding a post-patch clause which used the
> "touch -r" macro to reset the modification times of the files I patched to be
> the same an an unpatched macro file. This keeps the Makefile happy.
>
> It might turn out to be smarter to remove the patches and the touches of
> those macro files. It makes for a simpler Portfile. I have not decided.
It's not just this codebase that does that; it's a feature of autotools. That's
one of the reasons why I said to decide whether to patch the generated files or
the files they're generated from, not both.
