automake -a

[Marc Glisse]

On Mon, 23 Sep 2013, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> On 2013-09-23 15:37:20 +0200, Marc Glisse wrote:
>> On Mon, 23 Sep 2013, Niels Möller wrote:
>>> E.g., I think the COPYING file should stay in the repo, even if automake
>>> -a currently installs an identical file.
>>
>> Ah, I hadn't noticed COPYING, precisely because the file is identical ;-)
>> Ok with keeping it if you want to...
>
> I think that you must keep it: you choose the license, not the
> autotools developers.

I would assume that the autotools get the information on which licence is 
wanted from somewhere and don't add a random licence, but keeping it 
sounds natural indeed.

>> I did an automake -a -c -f, followed by hg status to see what had changed,
>> and pruned that list a bit.
>
> How about doing something like the autogen.sh script proposed by
> Daniel Richard G. for MPFR:
>
> #!/bin/sh
>
> # "autoreconf -f" will clobber our INSTALL file with a generic one if we
> # don't move it out of the way
>
> mv -f INSTALL INSTALL.$$.tmp
>
> autoreconf -v -f -i -W all
>
> rm -f INSTALL
> mv -f INSTALL.$$.tmp INSTALL
>
> rm -rf autom4te.cache

We could. I think avoiding -f is safer. Starting from a clean checkout 
when you upgrade your autotools isn't that hard. I hadn't realized that 
autoreconf -i -s would call automake -a, which is good.

So a minimal change to use autoreconf -i -s instead of our current long 
line would be nice.

A script could also be used to get the latest config.guess as 
configfsf.guess, but we probably don't want that (have to make sure it 
interacts ok with the specialized config.guess).

-- 
Marc Glisse