Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: make and stuff in autogen.sh

[David Kastrup]

Ralf Angeli <address@hidden> writes:

> Thinking about it, it is probably not much more bogus than the
> scheme we had before; when only the plain text files where generated
> directly from autogen.sh.  One could argue that the dependency on
> makeinfo could be bad but this obviously hasn't caused trouble in
> the past.

autogen.sh is strictly for developers.  I don't mind depending on
particular versions of makeinfo and autoconf in there.  You should not
need to run it from a tarball.  In fact, I am tempted to omit both
autogen.sh as well as README.CVS from the tarball, and I think we did
so previously.  I am not sure this jobes with the GPL:

    The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work
    for making modifications to it.  For an executable work, complete
    source code means all the source code for all modules it contains,
    plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts
    used to control compilation and installation of the executable.

The autoconf scripts and README do not appear to "control compilation
and installation of the executable".  I can see nothing specific about
them in the GNU standards: they explain what configure should do, but
not whether to include the source for it.

    However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need
    not include anything that is normally distributed (in either
    source or binary form) with the major components (compiler,
    kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable
    runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.


> You wrote that you want an easy way to set up a tarball-ready
> directory.  And I thought that running configure and make distclean
> would add an additional assurance that everything is in its correct
> place.

We are not talking about a package to unpack into the Emacs tree
here.  We are talking about a tarball that needs to get configured
still.  Correct places are for after that...

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum