Re: Autotools module and mandatory autogen

[Mathieu Bridon <bochecha daitauha fr>]

Tristan Van Berkom <tristan vanberkom codethink co uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 2017-11-07 at 10:13 +0000, Sam Thursfield wrote:
> > On 07/11/17 04:52, Mathieu Bridon wrote:
> > > I have to admit the difference in treatment surprised me a lot, and
> > > I
> > > can see it leading to a lot of confusion in the future. IMHO if
> > > BuildStream considers that the autogen step is mandatory, then it
> > > really should always run it no matter what.
> > >
> > > A simple (untested) fix would be to use the following conditionals
> > > instead:
> > >
> > >      if [ -e autogen ]; then ./autogen;
> > >      elif [ -e autogen.sh ]; then ./autogen.sh;
> > >      elif [ -e bootstrap ]; then ./bootstrap;
> > >      elif [ -e bootstrap.sh ]; then ./bootstrap.sh;
> > >      else autoreconf -ivf;
> > >      fi
> > >
> > > What do people here think? Does this seem important? Or am I just
> > > blocked on some unjustified need for absolute consistency? :)
> >
> > I think that change makes sense.
> >
> > There may be a few elements in projects which break because they have 
> > declared themselves to use 'autotools' when in fact they don't, but 
> > those should be fixed anyway.
>
> Also agree.
>
> As an additional note, pre-wrapped tarballs have a side effect of
> getting stale, there are a lot of tarballs which have not been re-
> rolled for a very long time (either unmaintained, or just simple enough
> they didnt need any update), these tarballs tend to fail on Aarch64
> without an autoreconf due to having been originally released with a
> config.sub and config.guess which never knew about Aarch64.

Ok then. I'm currently traveling without access to a computer, but I'll send a merge request as soon as I get 
back.

Thanks,


-- 
Mathieu