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* [gentoo-dev]  Remember, please don't use upstream-provided bootstrap unless necessary
@ 2008-06-04 16:46 Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò
  2008-06-04 17:22 ` [gentoo-dev] " Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò
  2008-06-09 21:18 ` [gentoo-dev] " Enrico Weigelt
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò @ 2008-06-04 16:46 UTC (permalink / raw
  To: gentoo-dev

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I stumbled across another ebuild today that used the upstream-provided
bootstrap script to rebuild autotools.

Please refrain from using those if you can.

Upstream doesn't always know better for our setup (it may try to second
guess our settings by looking for particular automake/autoconf
versions), it will show to the user information we don't care about,
almost all the bootstrap scripts I've seen don't even try to catch when
a step in the rebuild fails, they mask the need for autotools, and as
you don't inherit autotools eclass for running them, you usually forget
to add the autoconf/automake dependencies. And it makes very difficult
to track down which ebuilds do actually use autotools to track down if
there are changes to do.

Let's not even start to talk about bootstrap scritps that run
./configure by themselves, those are just plainly evil.

Please note that sometimes the bootstrap script is used to add extra m4
search directories and options like --foreign to automake. Well, here's
the deal:

- AT_M4DIR is the variable to use to pass extra m4 search directory to
  aclocal, no need for the bootstrap script;
- eautomake takes care by itself to identify the cases where --foreign
  is needed (this usually means when some of the standard documentation
  files are missign);

beside, if upstream is providing a bootstrap script for just these two
reasons, then it's time they learn about ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS.

Also make sure that autotools gets not rebuilt through maintainer mode,
that will make the configure run twice, wasting users' time, and is
usually evil if you are using unpack to check for the generated
configure (yes it happened to me a couple of time).

THANKS!

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/


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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2008-06-09 21:19 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 3+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
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2008-06-04 16:46 [gentoo-dev] Remember, please don't use upstream-provided bootstrap unless necessary Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò
2008-06-04 17:22 ` [gentoo-dev] " Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò
2008-06-09 21:18 ` [gentoo-dev] " Enrico Weigelt

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