Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: flameeyes@gmail.com (Diego 'Flameeyes' =?utf-8?Q?Petten=C3=B2?=)
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] Remember, please don't use upstream-provided bootstrap unless necessary
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:46:57
Message-Id: m2r6bddu6y.fsf@gmail.com
1 I stumbled across another ebuild today that used the upstream-provided
2 bootstrap script to rebuild autotools.
3
4 Please refrain from using those if you can.
5
6 Upstream doesn't always know better for our setup (it may try to second
7 guess our settings by looking for particular automake/autoconf
8 versions), it will show to the user information we don't care about,
9 almost all the bootstrap scripts I've seen don't even try to catch when
10 a step in the rebuild fails, they mask the need for autotools, and as
11 you don't inherit autotools eclass for running them, you usually forget
12 to add the autoconf/automake dependencies. And it makes very difficult
13 to track down which ebuilds do actually use autotools to track down if
14 there are changes to do.
15
16 Let's not even start to talk about bootstrap scritps that run
17 ./configure by themselves, those are just plainly evil.
18
19 Please note that sometimes the bootstrap script is used to add extra m4
20 search directories and options like --foreign to automake. Well, here's
21 the deal:
22
23 - AT_M4DIR is the variable to use to pass extra m4 search directory to
24 aclocal, no need for the bootstrap script;
25 - eautomake takes care by itself to identify the cases where --foreign
26 is needed (this usually means when some of the standard documentation
27 files are missign);
28
29 beside, if upstream is providing a bootstrap script for just these two
30 reasons, then it's time they learn about ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS.
31
32 Also make sure that autotools gets not rebuilt through maintainer mode,
33 that will make the configure run twice, wasting users' time, and is
34 usually evil if you are using unpack to check for the generated
35 configure (yes it happened to me a couple of time).
36
37 THANKS!
38
39 --
40 Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
41 http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

Replies

Subject Author
[gentoo-dev] Re: Remember, please don't use upstream-provided bootstrap unless necessary flameeyes@gmail.com (Diego 'Flameeyes' =?utf-8?Q?Petten=C3=B2?=)
Re: [gentoo-dev] Remember, please don't use upstream-provided bootstrap unless necessary Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@×××××.de>