Re: HP-UX make causes autoconf timestamp issues

[Eric Blake]

On 01/25/2011 12:51 PM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>> All the more reason to document the issue in INSTALL.  If I'm
>> understanding you correctly, disabling autom4te.cache only disables
>> autoconf's contribution to the rebuild rules (others may remain, for
>> things like gperf- or yacc-generated files), but we might as well start
>> somewhere by documenting what we can.
> 
> You are of course completely right, thanks for persisting.
> 
> Let's drop the proposed BUGS change, add an install.texi one instead.
> Together with my other hackishly written autoconf.texi patch I arrive
> at this now.

Looks better.

> 
> Thanks, and sorry for the high noise ratio (I should also be cutting
> down on cross posts again),

That's all right, and feel free to ping me if I missed something due to
the noise.

> +++ b/doc/install.texi
> @@ -261,6 +261,11 @@ Particular Systems
>  @noindent
>  and if that doesn't work, install pre-built binaries of GCC for HP-UX.
>  
> +HP-UX @command{make} updates targets which have the same time stamps as
> +their prerequisites, which makes it generally unusable when shipped
> +generated files such as @command{configure} are involved.  Use GNU
> address@hidden instead.

Nice choice of words - since INSTALL is generally used with an
autoconf-generated configure file, you've covered a specific example
most likely to be present in the package where the user is reading this
paragraph, while still leaving the wording broad enough to make it
obvious that configure is not the only potential problem.

Go ahead and apply; and I'll watch to see whether Karl's autoupdate
scripts copy it over to gnulib in the next day or two (or whether it
might need a manual prod).

If only we had more leverage to tell the HP-UX folks that they are
really doing their users a disservice by not fixing their make bug :)

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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