Re: [PATCH] {maint} distcheck: add support for AM_DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 06/15/2011 07:04 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 06/15/2011 02:18 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On 06/15/2011 09:40 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 14 June 2011, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > > > * Stefano Lattarini wrote on Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 05:33:39PM CEST:
> > > > I would suggest to at least discourage using this in the documentation.
> > > ... I agree, and I will make the change soon.  Maybe I can find a
> > > couple of
> > > examples of where the AM_DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS could be useful *and*
> > > legitimate; which would make my change more meaningful.
> > DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS is useful in situations when a plain
> > "./configure" is not meaningful to a source tree, i.e. when a
> > source-tree mandatorily requires some configuration argument.
> Such a source-tree is violating GNU Coding Standards.

a) DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS makes it compliant.
b) There are situations, in which it's technically very hard if not 
impossible to make automake's vanilla "make distcheck" functional.

My real-world use case: A deep source-tree with about a dozen 
AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS, with each of those being host-dependent, and the 
whole source tree only supporting one target at a time.

>   On the other
> hand, automake strives to be useful to more than just GCS-compliant
> packages.
Agreed.

Ralf