[ On Sunday, December 2, 2001 at 11:51:30 (-0800), Johnny Lam wrote: ]
> Subject: AUTOMAKE_OVERRIDE=YES by default?
>
> I am thinking of making AUTOMAKE_OVERRIDE default to "YES" in bsd.pkg.mk.
> This triggers the target that touches all of the existing configure.in and
> Makefile.am files so that the GNU auto* tools won't be invoked during a
> "make build".  I think this is the correct behaviour for pkgsrc because
> when packages do need autoconf/automake, they call them on their own as
> part of a pre-configure target.  Can anyone see any problem with this, or
> does anyone know of a package they maintain that relies on "make build" to
> call the GNU auto* tools?

Sounds OK to me, though it shouldn't really be necessary, at least not
for packages using automake.  Packages using (recent) automake will
disable use of the auto* tools if they're not found in the build
environment, and should always automatically force even out-of-date
auto* product files to be used without being rebuilt.

As far as I can tell there's no harm in using the auto* tools at build
time even if pkgsrc doesn't know about it, unless of course the version
found first in your path is not compatible with whatever the package
needs.  From pkgsrc's point of view the result is the same.

The only examples I can remember of encountering packages with
out-of-date autoconf product files were packages which didn't use
automake and which didn't have any standard way of avoiding running
autoconf.  I haven't tripped over any of those packages in pkgsrc
though, and I can't even find a concrete example of such a distribution
archive at the moment.  One such package that occasionally had this
problem in its distribution (though doesn't at the moment as far as I
can tell), but which normally always ships with its make targets for
calling autoconf disabled, is CVS.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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