[tex-live] Build of Oct 2, 22:45 source.development fails onMac OS X

Olaf Weber olaf at infovore.xs4all.nl
Sun Oct 3 13:12:34 CEST 2004


Fabrice Popineau writes:

>> As I've already wrote, I have exactly the same problem
>> on my Linux box. I cannot update my autoconf without breaking
>> so many things... Any clue?

> Drop that autoconf stuff.

> It is an issue I raised privately with a couple of people. My opinion is
> that it does more harm than good. And it also may well refrain potential
> developers to join if it is that easy to get stuck.

I'm inclined to disagree.  The problem with autoconf (automake) that
we've been running into is timestamps, combined with rules for
rebuilding those files that don't apply when (for example) the source
tree is not writable.  Just being more careful when doing a checkin
should go a long way to solve that.

> The real thing behind autoconf is:
> 1 - it is easy even for a newbie to turn a bunch of .c/.h files into
>     Makefiles
> 2 - it simply doesn't scale well.

> It would be much simpler to maintain a bunch of makefiles and
> c-auto.h for unixes.

I suspect you underestimate the amount of work required.  Certainly my
experience with packages that use this form of configuration is not
that good: the config file for the host the developer uses is often
the only one that's actually correct and up-to-date.

Complicating factors:

- We won't be able to abandon autoconf anyway as long as we include
  packages that use autoconf.
- libtool depends on autoconf.

> BTW:
> 1 - the naming for the 'features' that appear in c-auto.h is completely
> inconsistent. If you look at various GNU packages, you can find the same
> features named 2 or 3 times differently. Not good.

Some of this may be due to using different versions of autoconf, I
think.  Can you give some concrete examples?

> 2 - when you want to do too much clever things, you end up sometimes doing
> stupid things. Aka generate a 220k shell script for building a 30 lines .h
> file. I'm not sure we need that.

On the one hand, our 220k-sized scripts are on the smaller side these
days.  On the other hand, the autoconf developers do recognize that
this is a problem.

> Well, that's my opinion. I know I have no chances to convince people here.
> But I stated it 'for the record'.

> Fabrice

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)



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