[ On Sunday, March 28, 1999 at 01:25:18 (+0900), NAKAJIMA Yoshihiro wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: pkg/7254: when compiling fetchmail, autoheader is invoked
>
> In this case (fetchmail-4.7.7), config.h.in updated by
> autoheader is same as the original one.

I'm not sure how that matters.  If configure.in is patched a new
configure has to be generated.  Autoheader is run as because config.h.in
can depend on configure.in (i.e. autoconf's products) (and aclocal's
products too), so even if no change results it's still necessary to
allow the tools to guarantee this by mechanically going through the
steps.

As a developer you can side-step the mechanical steps and trick make
into thinking everything's OK, but that's a bad hack because if people
do this in the wrong circumstances (either because they're just
following what was done before, or because they saw it somewhere else),
then things will break.  It's often hard to undo a bad hack.

> I don't have obvious opinion whether everyone needs to install
> autoconf/automake or not.

There's always going to be a chicken&egg problem if developers don't
install these tools, and of course with pkgsrc it's easy enough for
users to install them too, and nobody even must know that they're
installing and using these tools either (they'll obviously see that they
are if they pay attention, but that's not the point).

The original argument in the GNU Standards for not requiring these tools
was that too many lazy developers whined about having to keep them
up-to-date in their build environments.  I think pkgsrc more than
eliminates that problem.

There's no need to invent smart and efficient hacks in a system like
pkgsrc because the tools will do all the grunt-work for you if you just
let them.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
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