Re: [gthumb-list] GNU Makefile Conventions

[Paolo Bacchilega <paolo bacchilega libero it>]

Il 12/05/2012 01:16, Ronald F. Guilmette ha scritto:
> For whatever it's worth, I just wanted to say that Paolo was right,
> and that all three of the problems I encountered which caused the
> Help subsystem in gthumb to malfunction did, in the end, turn out
> to be specific to the FreeBSD port of gthumb.  (I can also report
> that those are now being corrected in the FreeBSD port.)
>
> Before I go back into silent lurking mode however, i did want to
> contribute at least something that might be generally useful across
> platforms.
>
> While I was working on the gthumb sources, trying to find the cause(s)
> of the help problem(s) I had occasion to do "make maintainer-clean",
> you know, in order to be sure that I was really starting from a clean
> slate.
>
> Unfortunately, after I had done that I was no longer able to even
> run ./configure from the top-level directory.  This didn't seem right,
> so I looked into a bit further.
>
> What I found, pretty quickly, was the following old post to the GNU
> autoconf mailing list which goes into some very specific detail (in the
> latter half of the posting) about which files should NOT be deleted by
> maintainer-clean:
>
>     http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2007-03/msg00043.html
>
> The information is that posting is entire borne out by the clear and
> unambiguous text of the GNU Makefile coding standard:
>
>     http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Standard-Targets.html#Standard-Targets
>
> So anyway, as a result of reading the above, I ended up making the following
> changes to three files within the gthumb 2.14.3 sources... although really,
> the changes below for the top-level Makefile.in file are arguably unnecessary,
> because thas file should be automatically regenerated from the (modified)
> top-level Makefile.am file before another release tarball is created.
>
> In my opinion, all of these changes are necessary in order to bring the
> various files of gthumb into conformance with the GNU Makefile coding
> conventions.  Certainly, without these changes, after running the command
> "make maintainer-clean" one can no longer run configure from the top-level,
> and the GNU Makefile Coding Standard is quite clear and specific about that:
>
> `maintainer-clean'
>
>         ...
>         More generally, `make maintainer-clean' should not delete anything
>         that needs to exist in order to run `configure' and then begin to
>         build the program...
>
> Apparently, there is some rather widespread misunderstanding of this very
> point.
>
>
> Regards,
> rfg
>
> P.S.  After applying the following patches (to 2.14.3) I can report that yes,
> I was then subsequently able to make maintainer-clean and then ./configure
> successfully.

I added many files to MAINTAINERCLEANFILES to automatically generate a 
complete .gitignore file, it is possible that some of those files should 
be added to some other variable, also it is important to check whether 
'make dist-clean' correctly deletes all the generated files as well.

> diff -rc2 src/gthumb-2.14.3/Makefile.am build/gthumb-2.14.3/Makefile.am

please re-send the patch using 'diff -ur', it's not clear to me what the 
changes are using this output format.

- Paolo