Re: [avrdude-dev] make distcheck

[Brian Dean]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 11:17:10AM -0800, Theodore A. Roth wrote:

> I've been doing more tweaking and testing of the autotools build. I'm
> noticing that automake 1.5 and 1.6 are failing to run 'make distcheck'
> due to the pdf doc build, whereas 1.7 handles it smoothly.
> 
> Instead of continuing to add tweaks and rules to the Makefile.am and
> configure.ac files to accommodate various versions of autoconf and
> automake, I would rather just focus on specific versions (2.57 and
> 1.7.x). This would make the Makefile.am files simpler, which is always
> a good thing, since we won't have to write as many custom rules.
> 
> If this is acceptable, I can cleanup some of the Makefile.am files.
> Otherwise, I'll have to add some more rules.
> 
> Attached is a proposed change of the bootstrap file to force the
> correct versions. To override the defaults, either set AC_VER and
> AM_VER in your enviroment or ACLOCAL, AUTOHEADER, AUTOCONF, and
> AUTOMAKE. Of course, there are other ways to handle this...

Hmmm ... Sorry to make things harder for you Ted, but I had thought
that the auto* tools were needed on each system in order to build the
source.  That's why I wanted at least the minimum requirements to be
what was available on a fairly stock FreeBSD system available be the
ports tree.

However, I think I now understand that that's not the case - that the
auto* tools are only used to build the 'dist', and from there
'configure' does the rest.  If this is indeed the case, then I have no
objection at all to using the latest auto* stuff.

> You can grab the needed source with:
> 
>   wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.57.tar.bz2
>   wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/automake/automake-1.7.3.tar.bz2

I just built these on FreeBSD and they seemed to build just fine.  In
fact, I just re-bootstrapped my avrdude area with the new tools and it
produced a nice clean build.

However, running a 'make' after ./configure seems to do this:

        address@hidden:/avrdude- make
        cd . && autoheader
        touch ./ac_cfg.h.in
        cd . && /bin/sh ./config.status ac_cfg.h
        config.status: creating ac_cfg.h
        config.status: ac_cfg.h is unchanged
        make  all-recursive
        Making all in doc
        ...

Why is that running 'autoheader'?  Am I wrong in my assertion above
that once the auto* tools are used to bootstrap, that they are not
longer necessary?

If autoheader is necessary on the system building avrdude, then we
have to stick with whatever is available in the FreeBSD Ports tree.  I
can't expect someone to go out and manually install the latest
autoheader so that they can build avrdude.  That would be very much
contrary to the way the FreeBSD Ports tree is expected to work.

-Brian

P.S. - Can we take 'cvs' off the end of the VERSION string?