EDE regenerates autotools files to often

EDE regenerates autotools files to often

[Sascha Wilde]

Hi *,

I finally got around[0] to switch back to bug reporting mode for
CEDET/EDE again as promised...

Here is the first (a minor) one:

It seems that EDE automake projects re-invoke autoreconf on every build
command (ede-compile-target, ede-compile-project, ede-make-dist).
This takes a serious amount of time.

I vaguely recall having seen code in CEDET which tried to avoid
superfluous steps during build but I haven't verified that it is
supposed to work for autoreconf... 

cheers
sascha

[0] sometimes getting the flu has its advantages, too  :)
-- 
Sascha Wilde : "Der Nicht-Denkende glaubt, dass niemand denkt,
             : der Denkende weiss es!"
             : (Gabriel Laub)

Re: EDE regenerates autotools files to often

[Eric M. Ludlam]

On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 15:22 +0100, Sascha Wilde wrote:
> Hi *,
> 
> I finally got around[0] to switch back to bug reporting mode for
> CEDET/EDE again as promised...
> 
> Here is the first (a minor) one:
> 
> It seems that EDE automake projects re-invoke autoreconf on every build
> command (ede-compile-target, ede-compile-project, ede-make-dist).
> This takes a serious amount of time.
> 
> I vaguely recall having seen code in CEDET which tried to avoid
> superfluous steps during build but I haven't verified that it is
> supposed to work for autoreconf... 
> 
> cheers
> sascha
> 
> [0] sometimes getting the flu has its advantages, too  :)

Hi,

  Your previous bugs indicated that we needed to call autoreconf all the
time.  A side effect was that the auto scale-back of calling the
miscellaneous autoconf features was removed.

I would guess that there is some simple algorithm that could be used,
but I don't know what it might be as I haven't looked into it much.

We could also make it the responsibility of the user to choose which
kind of compile to do.

Eric

Re: EDE regenerates autotools files to often

[Sascha Wilde]

"Eric M. Ludlam" <eric@siege-engine.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 15:22 +0100, Sascha Wilde wrote:
>> It seems that EDE automake projects re-invoke autoreconf on every build
>> command (ede-compile-target, ede-compile-project, ede-make-dist).
>> This takes a serious amount of time.
[...]
>   Your previous bugs indicated that we needed to call autoreconf all the
> time. 

In this case my bug report was unclear.  Calling autoreconf all the time
is definitely to much.  ;-)

> A side effect was that the auto scale-back of calling the
> miscellaneous autoconf features was removed.
>
> I would guess that there is some simple algorithm that could be used,
> but I don't know what it might be as I haven't looked into it much.

In most cases autoreconf needs only to be called once for a project: to
create all the infrastructure scripts used by the auto tools.  After
that changes to configure.ac or Makefile.am trigger automatic
regeneration (via the "missing" script) of all depending files during an
regular build.  For example:
  % touch configure.ac
  % make
  cd . && /bin/sh /tmp/EDE-Automake-Test-1.0/missing --run aclocal-1.10 
  cd . && /bin/sh /tmp/EDE-Automake-Test-1.0/missing --run automake-1.10 --gnu 
  cd . && /bin/sh /tmp/EDE-Automake-Test-1.0/missing --run autoconf
  /bin/sh ./config.status --recheck
  running CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/sh /bin/sh ./configure  --prefix /tmp/test --no-create --no-recursion
[...]

so the easiest strategy might be to only run autoreconf when the basic
infrastructure (missing, ltmain.sh, etc -- I'm no autotools expert, so I
don't really know what would be an good list of files to check for) is
missing.

Additionally maybe interactive call of ede-proj-regenerate should force
autoreconf, too.

cheers
ssacha
-- 
Sascha Wilde
Life's too short to read boring signatures