Re: Annoyingly cautious make rules

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 12/02/11 16:34, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> you must rerun configure anyway when it changes, not matter how you
> update it.  This has nothing to do with maintainer mode.

Yes, and that was the point I was trying to make (evidently I was
not clear enough): the main 2011-03-20 changes are independent of
maintainer mode, and these changes do not motivate making
maintainer mode the default for ordinary builds.


On 12/02/11 15:26, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> Those [2011-03-20] changes were all about building configure locally from
> configure.in rather than getting it from the VCS.  copy-autogen is only
> a fallback case that's expected to be used only by those very few people
> who don't have an autoconf that's sufficiently up to date.

Yes, but regardless of whether one uses autogen.sh or
copy_autogen to build 'configure' locally, 'configure' is up to
date afterwards.  So either way, the maintainer-mode dependencies
do not help and are not needed.

I suspect the reasoning was that, if you run autogen.sh, then
you're a maintainer and you most likely want maintainer mode.
That makes sense.  And we can implement that by having autogen.sh
run 'configure' in maintainer mode, or having it recommend running
'configure' that way.  But that doesn't mean that maintainer mode
should be the default for ordinary builds.