Re: gawk, subversion, and timestamps

[Mike Owens]

Thank you for your reply. I think part of the problem, if not most, is
that I don't understand autotools as well as I should, so that I would
know to try some of your suggestions on my own. I am working on this,
but I think it will take some time before I become proficient.

Your second suggested worked perfectly. The first suggestion got
further than my previous experience, but still ultimately required the
use of awk on the system -- Solaris's awk -- which lead to the build
failing. In any case, the second route is something I incorporated
into my build script in the working branch, and it now automatically
builds without incident.

Hopefully, as I spend more time learning about autotools, perhaps I
can help resolve these problems myself and submit patches. In the
meantime, I appreciate the help you and others have provided me on
this list.

-- Mike

On 2/2/07, Bob Proulx <address@hidden> wrote:
> Mike Owens wrote:
> > 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?
>
> There are alternative ways of dealing with this issue.  One is not to
> check into version control generated files.  Generally as a developer
> I prefer that rule best.  But since you are dealing with these as
> upstream vendor branches I can understand your wanting to check in the
> entire thing.
>
> The best solution to this that I know of is to 'touch' the files with
> the right timestamps so that make will see things ordered by time in
> the same way that they would be ordered when unpacked from the tar
> image.  This depends upon the package but for gawk something like
> the following.  Basically unpack a tar image and sort the directory by
> time and see which ones need to be in which time ordering and force
> that ordering.
>
>   touch aclocal.m4
>   find . -name Makefile.in -print0 | xargs -r0 touch
>   touch configure configh.in config.status config.h
>
> Another possibly simpler way is that you can always touch all of the
> files to the same timestamp.  If they have the same timestamp then
> they will appear to be up to date.  Something like this:
>
>   find . -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 touch -r configure.ac
>
> Bob