[Mageia-dev] autogen.sh

Colin Guthrie mageia at colin.guthr.ie
Wed Sep 19 13:01:47 CEST 2012


'Twas brillig, and Oden Eriksson at 19/09/12 09:55 did gyre and gimble:
> Hello people.
> 
> Someone was wondering why i added autogen.sh in libxslt. There is a reason for 
> this after long time maintaining open source softwares. See it as a "last 
> known good" way of using the autopoo stuff as done upstream.  If "autoreconf -
> fi" should ever fail in libxslt use the provided autogen.sh file. These files 
> tends to disappear or be moved to the upstream release managers private hard 
> drive only, or something like that. It's simply wise to keep autogen.sh for 
> ourselves for reference. If you don't need to use it, fine, but keep it.

autogen.sh or bootstrap.sh and similar scripts are usually in upstream
SCM repositories but simply are often marked as NODIST or similar such
that they do not make it into tarballs (that's not always the case - it
varies from project to project).

They are typically just wrappers around various auto* stuff, but 9 times
out of 10 if you change some of the .am or .in files in patches, you
don't need to redo the full bootstrap process, it's often just a matter
of calling autoreconf or similar.

But this is also only needed if:
 1. We apply patches that touch some of the .am/.in files.
 or
 2. The system on which "make dist" was run is somehow very broken and
doesn't play nice with our environment (quite rare)

I don't see either being true in the libxslt case so I wonder why
autogen.sh is needed to make it build?

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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