[Fedora-directory-devel] Please review: [Bug 212098] Use autoconf to generate task perl script templates

[Richard Megginson]

Rob Crittenden wrote:
> Nathan Kinder wrote:
>> Richard Megginson wrote:
>>> Andrew Bartlett wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 18:14 -0700, Pete Rowley wrote:
>>>>  
>>>>> Andrew Bartlett wrote:
>>>>>  
>>>>>> Our current policy is to generate these files for release 
>>>>>> tarballs, and
>>>>>> for our 'unpacked' tree on samba.org (current SVN checked out).
>>>>>>         
>>>>> OTOH they are required in order to do:
>>>>>
>>>>> cvs co
>>>>> ./configure
>>>>> make
>>>>>     
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, projects typically end up with an ./autogen.sh to make the right
>>>> innovation of the configure generation tool.
>>>>   
>>> I've found that using autoreconf usually does the right thing.  When 
>>> I change configure.ac/in or Makefile.am or an .m4 file, I always run
>>> autoreconf -vfi
>>>  -v, --verbose            verbosely report processing
>>>  -f, --force              consider all files obsolete
>>>  -i, --install            copy missing auxiliary files
>>> It takes a little longer, but I almost never have conflict or 
>>> timestamp problems.  Plus, it's part of the standard autotools 
>>> package, and it is the way the autoconf/automake manuals recommend 
>>> rebuilding the autotool files.
>>> For some projects, this won't work (e.g. for mozldap, you have to 
>>> just use autoconf-2.13, not autoreconf or autoreconf-2.13).
>> As I just very recently found out, we also need a very specific 
>> version of libtool (1.5.22) to generate ltmain.sh if we want to be 
>> able to build a 64-bit Directory Server on Solaris.  Running 
>> "autoreconf -fvi" will generate a new ltmain.sh that may be a version 
>> that we don't want to check in if we expect to be able to immediately 
>> run "configure; make install" after checking out the code.
>>
>> -NGK
>
> The real pain is when not all of the files have changed and you check 
> in only those that did. This can cause an unwanted auto* rebuild.
>
> I've taken to checking everything in at once whenever one thing 
> changes with:
>
> cvs ci -f Makefile.am configure.in aclocal.m4 Makefile.in configure
>
> This preserves the proper timestamp/dependency order (at least for me).

If autoreconf doesn't work for directory server, do we need to create an 
autogen.sh script that "does the right thing"?  I would rather not, but 
if that is the only way to preserve the correct version of ltmain.sh, 
then we need to do it.  For example, we won't be able to use libtool on 
RHEL4 (with the standard RH updates anyway) because the bundled version 
of libtool is 1.5.6.  However, Fedora Core 5 (and probably RHEL5) are ok 
because they use 1.5.22.  I fear this may not be the only problem with 
autotool compatability - we also had a problem with hpux 11.23 ia64.

So, some options:
1) Only use autoreconf, and only run it on systems that use recent 
versions of autotools (e.g. fc5) - do not allow the use of autotools on 
RHEL4 or other less recent platforms.
2) Create an autogen.sh that first looks at the versions of the tools on 
the system and bails out if it finds an incompatible version - note that 
we would still have to run it on a modern system in order to actually 
update the autoconf files
2a) Have autogen.sh "patch" ltmain.sh when run on less recent systems, 
to allow us to use it on RHEL4 etc.
3) Make ltmain.sh (and possibly other files) somehow read-only with 
respect to autoreconf
>
> rob
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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