Re: configure question.

[Mike Sangrey <mike sojurn lns pa us>]

nodatadj@webtribe.net said:
> gandalf@pobox.com said:
> > Soemtimes when I am compiling an app, I'll run configure, and it will go
> > through its thing and everything will be fine.  then when I run make, it
> > goes and runs autoconf, automake, etc and then re-runs configure.  My
> > question is why does it do this?  Why not just begin compiling?

>     This usually happens when you've changed configure.in and make has
> detected it's changed and runs autoconf and then configure. I've only
> seen it happen after I've run ./configure for the first time when I've
> updated something from CVS and it's changed configure.in, and I've
> forgotten to run autoconf  to update the configure script.

> Iain


Building something requires a directed acyclic graph.  If make reruns
configure then either the graph is wrong somewhere, or in this instance,
Chris's understanding of running configure first is wrong.

Possibly the dependencies are incorrect, or the action to take is not
correct.  One thing that I've seen happen is someone will run a much
bigger action than is needed.  For example, they need to build one
object in a library, but they don't know how to replace just that one
object, so they rebuild the entire library.

Has someone coded in the makefile a "we'll just run configure here,
it will catch what we need?"

Is there something in the makefile which touches configure.in in
some way, but configure.in is not recorded as a dependency?  If there
is some recursive making, this might cause the above behavior.

You could run make in debugging mode.  You get lots of output, but grepping 
for configure should clue you into what make is thinking.

Hope this helps in some way.
-- 
Mike Sangrey
mike@sojurn.lns.pa.us