Re: Autotools-generated 'configure' & 'Makefile.in' considered binaries?

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi!

Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> skribis:

> Quite some packages in Guix use the Autotools system.  In this system,
> a 'configure.ac' and 'Makefile.am' script / makefile is written, from
> which 'autoconf' & 'automake' generate a very long bash script and a
> Makefile.in.  Depending on the maintainer of the upstream package, this
> 'configure' and 'Makefile.in' are sometimes included in release
> tarballs.

Clearly, this is an exception to the rule in Guix, some might say it’s
the elephant in the room.

Debian has long considered that these are not source and so it
regenerates all these files as a first step (IIRC).

This is conceptually the “right thing”, but it raises a significant
bootstrapping problem.  Our bootstrap path currently focuses on being
able to run shell scripts, in particular ‘configure’ scripts, before we
can even build Bash, thanks to Gash and Gash-Utils.  If we were to build
the autotools machinery systematically, we’d need Gash-Utils to provide
a Perl and an M4 implementation.  (Now, Timothy has written an Awk
interpreter, so a Perl interpreter can’t be so hard, right?  :-))
The other option is to write an Autoconf and Automake implementation…

As a first milestone, maybe we could start running ‘autoreconf’ more
often, for packages higher in the graph.  We could change the
‘bootstrap’ build phase to do that unless it’s explicitly turned off.
It may turn out to be a Sisyphean task though…

Thoughts?

Ludo’.