gawk, subversion, and timestamps

[Mike Owens]

I am trying to maintain various versions of OSS projects in subversion
vendor branches. I have recently discovered that subversion's lack of
tracking the original mtimes of files can cause problems in building
various projects. I am currently having a problem with gawk, and I
think sed.

It seems that the newer timestamps that subversion applies to the
files causes various things to be rebuilt which normally wouldn't in
the tarball. The problem is that when this happens with gawk, gawk
uses gawk in the configuration process, and I happen to be using this
on a Solaris OS, and its version of awk seems to be incompatible,
causing the build to fail.

So I have a chicken or the egg problem. As long as I have gawk on the
system, the subversion timestamp problem presents no trouble, as the
existing gawk will get things working. Ideally, I would like to be
able to build the gawk just I would from the tarball, not needing to
have a pre-existing version of gawk on the system.

So, the question is, what can I do to make gawk build correctly given
that subversion screwed up all the mtimes when I imported it? I
learned that for automake, for example, I can run its bootstrap
script, which gets things to working. Is there a similar way I get
gawk (and sed) to build normally as well?

-- Mike