Re: Chicken/egg problem building from a 'git clone'

[John Tapsell <johnflux@gmail.com>]

2009/3/5 Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>:
> Joi Ellis wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 6 Feb 2009, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>>
>>> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
>>>
>>>> Now, in this case, it was only one tweak and other responders have
>>>> already pointed him in the right direction. So just making that tweak
>>>> manually is probably the sane thing to do in this situation.
>>>>
>>>> But I wanted to point out that autoconf is not totally without value
>>>> here.
>>>
>>> I am not saying something that strong, either.  If autoconf generated
>>> configure works _for you_ without hassle, great.  Keep using it.
>>>
>>> The original message that started this thread was what to do when it does
>>> NOT work for you, and my point was in general it is much nicer to point
>>> at
>>> the knob to tweak from the make invocation command line (or in
>>> config.mak)
>>> than having you spend time on upgrade autoconf, generate configure and
>>> run
>>> it.
>>
>> Actually, guys, if you go back and re-read my original message, I was
>> pointing out that if you use a 'git clone' to get a build tree, THERE IS
>> NO CONFIGURE SCRIPT in the tree.
>>
>> The problem is not that the configure script does not work.  I pointed
>> out in the first paragraph that the configure script in the TARBALL
>> works just fine.  What I pointed out is that the build tree DOES NOT
>> PROVIDE THE CONFIGURE SCRIPT.  All I asked you to do is to consider
>> adding the configure script to the repository so that it gets pushed out
>> in a clone.
>>
>>> Fanboys may say that autoconf generated configure is the greatest thing
>>> since sliced bread.  But let's face it.  Honestly, the track record of
>>> those people in keeping autoconf part in this project up-to-date has not
>>> been all that great.  There are things that the generated configure file
>>> does not detect nor configure correctly (we had --with-expat patch, and
>>> we
>>> also saw "the trailing slash in template_dir definition in config.mak.in"
>>> discussed fairly recently).  You are much better off tweaking known
>>> peculiarity of your platform in config.mak, when configure does not work
>>> out of box for you.
>>
>> I've been building and installing multi-platform *nix software on
>> various flavors for two decades now.  "./configure && make && make
>> install" has been the standard build process even before GNU.  The whole
>> point of
>> autoconf/configure/make tools is to eliminate the need to manually tweak
>> makefiles so that software is easily portable between platforms.
>
> ./configure is a generated script. Including it in the repository is not
> something many projects do, since one of the things developers will be
> working on is to change how that file is generated. Including it in the
> release tar-balls is something every project (that uses autoconf) does,
> since those are aimed at end-users.

Reason that it should be included:

* configure scripts usually are included.  git was the first source
code in a long time that I've seen without one
* we have lots other files in git.git that are autogenerated (the
documentation files, for example)
* people are used to being able to do "./configure; make; make install"
* It doesn't hurt anyone to do it.

John