11:20 a.m.
Welcome to autotools hell...
fedora-directory-devel-request(a)redhat.com wrote:
> The real pain is when not all of the files have changed and you
check
> in only those that did. This can cause an unwanted auto* rebuild.
>
> I've taken to checking everything in at once whenever one thing
> changes with:
>
> cvs ci -f Makefile.am configure.in aclocal.m4 Makefile.in configure
>
> This preserves the proper timestamp/dependency order (at least for me).
First: use a recent automake (1.9.x) that supports the
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro, and use that in your configure.ac file. This
will turn off the automatic dependency checking/regeneration of the
Makefile/configure/etc scripts unless you explicitly ask for them (using
configure --enable-maintainer-mode). As a general rule, you don't want
maintainer mode enabled. It was stupid of them to make it the default
behavior but at least it's possible to turn it off now.
Personally I disable as much of this cruft as possible, because even as
a source tree maintainer it only slows me down. (OpenLDAP uses
hand-written Makefile.in and avoids automake because older versions of
automake were just too painful to deal with.)
In source trees that we import from other projects (Heimdal and Cyrus
SASL being the prime offenders here) I always doctor up the
Makefile.in's to comment out the autoregen dependencies before importing
them. There's no reliable way to make sure the datestamps come out of
the CVS repository intact. A slight network delay during a checkout will
cause some files to be newer than expected, thus causing an unnecessary
regen cycle.
So in short: commit everything up to the configure script, so that
arbitrary people can do a checkout / configure / make. Only a very small
number of people should ever be regenerating and committing the other
auto* files, so remove the default rules that cause them to be
regenerated automatically. (I.e., use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE.)
As a further refinement, I added these rules to OpenLDAP's configure.in
to speed up libtool generation:
dnl Disable libtool 1.5 support for languages we don't use
define([AC_LIBTOOL_LANG_CXX_CONFIG], [:])dnl
define([AC_LIBTOOL_LANG_F77_CONFIG], [:])dnl
define([AC_LIBTOOL_LANG_GCJ_CONFIG], [:])dnl
Of course if you're actually using C++ you'll have to let that run as
usual. But it saves a noticable amount of time on slow build machines to
bypass checks for languages we don't need.
If autoreconf doesn't work for directory server, do we need to
create an
autogen.sh script that "does the right thing"? I would rather not, but
if that is the only way to preserve the correct version of ltmain.sh,
then we need to do it. For example, we won't be able to use libtool on
RHEL4 (with the standard RH updates anyway) because the bundled version
of libtool is 1.5.6. However, Fedora Core 5 (and probably RHEL5) are ok
because they use 1.5.22. I fear this may not be the only problem with
autotool compatability - we also had a problem with hpux 11.23 ia64.
So, some options:
1) Only use autoreconf, and only run it on systems that use recent
versions of autotools (e.g. fc5) - do not allow the use of autotools on
RHEL4 or other less recent platforms.
Probably will cause more problems down the road.
2) Create an autogen.sh that first looks at the versions of the tools
on
the system and bails out if it finds an incompatible version - note that
we would still have to run it on a modern system in order to actually
update the autoconf files
This is probably the most workable idea, and it's not a major hardship.
2a) Have autogen.sh "patch" ltmain.sh when run on less
recent systems,
to allow us to use it on RHEL4 etc.
3) Make ltmain.sh (and possibly other files) somehow read-only with
respect to autoreconf
> rob
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc
OpenLDAP Core Team http://www.openldap.org/project/
2:15 p.m.
New subject: [Fedora-directory-devel] Re: Please review: [Bug 212098] Use autoconf to generate task perl script templates
Howard Chu wrote:
Welcome to autotools hell...
fedora-directory-devel-request(a)redhat.com wrote:
>> The real pain is when not all of the files have changed and you check
>> in only those that did. This can cause an unwanted auto* rebuild.
>>
>> I've taken to checking everything in at once whenever one thing
>> changes with:
>>
>> cvs ci -f Makefile.am configure.in aclocal.m4 Makefile.in configure
>>
>> This preserves the proper timestamp/dependency order (at least for me).
First: use a recent automake (1.9.x) that supports the
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro, and use that in your configure.ac file. This
will turn off the automatic dependency checking/regeneration of the
Makefile/configure/etc scripts unless you explicitly ask for them (using
configure --enable-maintainer-mode). As a general rule, you don't want
maintainer mode enabled. It was stupid of them to make it the default
behavior but at least it's possible to turn it off now.
One more note - it will make your lives easier if you standardize on a
single version of each tool, so that when you check in newly generated
files the diffs will be small and meaningful. Otherwise you get a lot of
noise, as Andrew already pointed out.
In the past we had things set up so that only a single maintainer was
permitted to regenerate and check in configure script and associated
files, to avoid the issue of having many tool versions in use. Also
there were fixes in our blessed tool versions that the upstream
maintainers hadn't rolled out yet, so we had to keep tarballs of the
specific tools available for download as well.
I think we still have a minor patch in our autoconf tool that the
upstream guys haven't adopted yet - redirecting stderr from the conftest
programs into the logfile instead of /dev/null (which stock autoconf
does), so that it's actually possible to diagnose why a config test
fails. It never fails to amaze me how incredibly un-useful these tools
are out of the box, and how long it takes to get them fixed.
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc
OpenLDAP Core Team http://www.openldap.org/project/
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Howard Chu