Re: Autobuild of gnulib

[Bruno Haible]

Simon Josefsson writes:
> Btw, does anyone know why --create-testdir runs ./configure + make
> distclean?

It does it when the gllib/ directory contains built sources. A possible and worthy
optimization would be to do it only if it contains built sources that are not listed
in MOSTLYCLEANFILES, CLEANFILES, or DISTCLEANFILES (or equivalently: if it
contains built sources that are listed in EXTRA_DIST).

Without this code, e.g. --create-testdir of the getdate module will create
getdate.y but not getdate.c. I.e. if you transfer the resulting testdir to a machine
that doesn't have bison, it will not work.

What you can do for your situation, where the build machine does have the unusual
tools like bison, autoconf, GNU sort etc., is to introduce a gnulib-tool option
--assume-unual-tools that will skip this code that costs 3 hours.

Bruno