Re: autogen.sh warnings

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com>]

On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 04:49:08PM -0600, Bruce Dubbs wrote:
> I've been looking at autogen.sh some more.
>
> Does anyone know why the lines:
>
> # FIXME: automake doesn't like that there's no Makefile.am
> automake -a -c -f || true
>
> are present at all?  Since there is no Makefile.am, it looks like  
> automake only creates a few files and aborts.
>
> Doing an experiment, I checked out a new version of trunk twice.  In  
> both cases I ran md5sum on all the files in the top level directory.  In  
> case 1, I didn't change anything and ran autogen.sh and then ran md5sum
> again.  In case 2, I commented out the automake line above.
>
> As you can see below, automake only adds standard 'config.guess',  
> 'config.sub', and 'missing' scripts.
>
> The real purpose of automake is to create a Makefile.in for configure.  
> GRUB doesn't use it for that.  Is there any reason to not just add the  
> three files to the bzr repository and remove the automake line from  
> autogen.sh?

These files do change from time to time, in ways that are important; for
example, config.guess and config.sub are updated to support new
architectures or new variants of existing architectures. It's best to
have this done automatically rather than doing it once manually and then
forgetting about it.

We could have a temporary directory in which we run automake, just for
the purpose of getting hold of these files. Perhaps something like this:

  rm -rf automake-tmp
  mkdir -p automake-tmp
  cat >automake-tmp/configure.ac <<EOF
AC_INIT([temporary], [0.1])
AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([.])
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
AC_CANONICAL_BUILD
AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile])
EOF
  touch automake-tmp/Makefile.am
  (cd automake-tmp && aclocal && automake -a -c -f --foreign)
  cp -a automake-tmp/config.guess automake-tmp/config.sub \
        automake-tmp/install-sh automake-tmp/missing \
        .
  rm -rf automake-tmp

I don't know whether this is worth it, but it would be possible.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]