Re: automake --no-force (Was: autoreconf invode automake with --no-force (autoconf ver.2.54))

[Akim Demaille]

| At 26 Sep 2002 15:12:10 +0200,
| Akim Demaille wrote:
| > This is very bizarre!  But I'm lost in your list of actions.  Could
| > you send a small example of touch and cat that yields the problem?  Or
| > a simple tarball in which one must run autoreconf?  Thanks!
| 
| I put tarbal http://www.d3.dion.ne.jp/~fut_nis/athello.tar.gz .
| 
| Here does not work fine:
| $ tar xzvf ../athello.tar.gz 
| $ cd athello/
| $ ls
| $ autoreconf -si
| $ ./configure
| $ make distcheck
| 
| Here works fine:
| $ tar xzvf ../athello.tar.gz 
| $ cd athello/
| $ autoreconf -fsi     # Add -f option 
| $ ./configure
| $ make distcheck
| 
| > no --force (to autoreconf) => --no-force (to automake).
| 
| I'll use -f or --force option such situations.  Thank you for your
| advise.

I would call this an automake bug.  The problem is that you are
``lying´´ to automake: depcomp etc. are present in the top level, but
you say AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([config]).  So it gets confused, and indeed
for some reason:

/tmp % diff 1 2 -ur                                              nostromo 12:14
diff -ur 1/athello/Makefile.in 2/athello/Makefile.in
--- 1/athello/Makefile.in       2002-09-30 12:13:54.000000000 +0200
+++ 2/athello/Makefile.in       2002-09-30 12:14:18.000000000 +0200
@@ -127,9 +127,10 @@
        all-recursive install-data-recursive install-exec-recursive \
        installdirs-recursive install-recursive uninstall-recursive \
        check-recursive installcheck-recursive
-DIST_COMMON = Makefile.am Makefile.in aclocal.m4 config/config.guess \
-       config/config.sub config/install-sh config/ltmain.sh \
-       config/missing config/mkinstalldirs configure configure.in
+DIST_COMMON = Makefile.am Makefile.in aclocal.m4 config/compile \
+       config/config.guess config/config.sub config/depcomp \
+       config/install-sh config/missing config/mkinstalldirs configure \
+       configure.in
 DIST_SUBDIRS = $(SUBDIRS)
 all: all-recursive


where 1 results from:

| $ tar xzvf ../athello.tar.gz 
| $ cd athello/
| $ aclocal
| $ automake --add-missing --no-force

and 2 from:

| $ tar xzvf ../athello.tar.gz 
| $ cd athello/
| $ aclocal
| $ automake --add-missing


BTW, I think that when AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR is given, Automake should
complain when it sees files that are not in AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR.  It is
entitled to complain about them because the behavior of automake
changes depending whether the file is there or not.


I'm making this suggestion because of a minor problem I had: because
of a stupid cp I had a mkinstalldirs in my top level, a copy of the
one in config/.  Automake didn't warn me and started distributing it.

We fight hard in Automake to avoid EXTRA_DIST = *.c.  This case is
very similar to my eyes.