LinuxQuestions.org - Do you understand how autotools works?

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- - Do you understand how autotools works? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/do-you-understand-how-autotools-works-933637/)

Quote:

Originally Posted by ta0kira (Post 4630936)

Certainly the developer needs those things, but if you make dist then the package will include configure, etc. and auto* won't need to be run again for it to work. If you're building from a repo and not from an archive intended for distribution, that's entirely different from what I was talking about in my previous post. And you've essentially just expressed a tautology: If the project uses autotools then you might need autotools installed to work on the project. You could say the same thing about flex/bison: If I write a parser and don't put the generated sources in the repo then of course you'll have to generate them, but that's not the fault of the tools.
Kevin Barry

I don't understand what we're discussing? I merely thought I was expressing those things required to use autotools? Just as it's true that the auto-generated parser code doesn't always work correctly (think - version differences for flex/bison, although they are probably much rarer), the generated ./configure doesn't always work correctly (I had problems recently with the ircd-seven ./configure on my ubuntu system). In those cases, without the complete package we cannot even hope to build the system. My point remains valid - if a project depends on autotools, it depends on autotools, and everything that autotools depends on.

I'm not saying that this is a BAD or GOOD thing (which implies value).

It's merely a fact.

Quote:

Originally Posted by orgcandman (Post 4631533)

Yes, this is obviously an argument about nothing. Developer vs. end-user requirements; you're discussing one, I'm discussing the other.

Even with my own projects, I have to autoreconf pretty much every time I check out a repo that has a configure generated using another auto* version. And yes, that's just to build something that already builds somewhere else. Somehow make dist magically takes care of that for the archive, however.
Kevin Barry