[59] in athena10
Re: /svn/athena r22710 - in trunk/debathena/debathena: .
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Mon Jan 28 22:33:32 2008
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Tim Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>
Cc: athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0801282021190.14241@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:33:01 -0500
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On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 21:24 -0500, Tim Abbott wrote:
> One simplication would be using the DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_AUTOCONF variable
> (which is supposed to be set to a version of autoconf like 2.50, but some
> Debathena packages erroneously set to 1); it handles adding the
> autotools-dev and autoconf dependencies, and actually running autoconf.
It's designed for packages which include their own configure scripts.
Practically speaking, I think it would work, except that it wouldn't
remove configure in the clean target.
> I think using DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_AUTOCONF would also allow us to remove the
> config.sub and config.guess copying, since that gets done by buildcore.mk
> already.
buildcore.mk will only replace an existing config.sub and config.guess.
If they don't exist, it won't copy them in. (Creating zero-length files
in the rules won't work since makefile conditionals are evaluated prior
to execution of rules.)
> I notice the Athena mkinstalldirs and install-sh seem to be the same as
> those provided by the automake1.10 package -- it might be preferable to
> use those than including our own copy.
I was reluctant to add a dependency on a specific version of automake
for this purpose, since we aren't actually using automake proper. The
scripts do not change often (unlike config.guess or config.sub) so this
seemed less likely to require future maintenance. I'm flexible on this
point, though. In an ideal world these would be packaged with autoconf
rather than automake, but this isn't an ideal world.
> Also, Anders observes that install-sh, libtool, and ltmain.sh seem to not
> be used in any of the Athena packages we're aware of; it may be that they
> can be eliminated entirely.
install-sh is a hard prerequisite of all autoconf-generated configure
scripts. (Try removing install-sh and running configure.) libtool is
not used by an current Athena packages but it ought to be used by all
Athena libraries according to Debian policy as I understand it.
> There are also DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_LIBTOOL, DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_ACLOCAL and
> DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_AUTOMAKE variables that could be used to get CDBS to
> perform some of these other steps. I think DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_ACLOCAL may be
> able to replace the code for creating aclocal.m4 (though we'd still need
> install /usr/share/debathena-build-common/aclocal.m4 somewhere where
> aclocal will look).
I'll have another look at the libtool and aclocal logic. I don't recall
what I ran into which made ignoring it seem simpler.
