Re: false positive result with 'make distcheck'

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

regarding the problem discussed earlier in this thread:

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 06:17:20PM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Now, even when you stick "$(srcdir)/" in front of the prerequisites,
> still VPATH searching applies.  Since source tree of the distcheck
> source (that below /tmp/rpmbuildupdate-0.7/rpmbuildupdate-0.7) does
> not contain the *.in files, but VPATH contains "..", the `make' executed
> inside the directory /tmp/rpmbuildupdate-0.7/_build finds the file
>   ../../rpmbuildupdate.in.in
> and happily uses them; that is: the second "../" is your "$(srcdir)/",

I made a suggestion, and Ralf oposed to it.

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 01:35:54PM +0100, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> * Stepan Kasal wrote on Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 12:40:18PM CET:
> > [...]  So it seems that distcheck would
> > catch more bugs if `_build' were not a subdirectory of the
> > expanded
> > tarball tree.
>
> It would possibly catch a different set of bugs.  There isn't a
> strict inclusion ordering on the set of all imaginable bugs; maybe
> if bugs are weighted by the likelihood by which they happen, [...]

I think your reasoning is too teoretical.
I would put it like this:

When srcdir is ".." (or "../.." or some such), than it is a relative
path which is valid in every directory.
OTOH, if srcdir were "../_dist/$(distdir)" then it would be invalid
in most places, so it is could be used relatively to other
directory then the one which it was meant for.
That's why I think `make distcheck' should use something like
        _dist/$(distdir)
        _build
        _inst

Have a nice day,
        Stepan