[gmx-developers] autoconf/automake

[Erik Lindahl]

David van der Spoel wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 10:03, Anton Feenstra wrote:
> 
>>Hi,
>>
>>
>>While doing some (quite minor) development stuff on Gromacs here in 
>>Amsterdam, I wondered about the following. We don't have autoconf/
>>automake installed here. SInce the generated files are system-
>>independent anyway, wouldn't it be nice to have them included in the
>>CVS, possibly as a separate module, so they can be checked-out if
>>wanted in stead of generated? Any developer would already have the
>>up-to-date files in his/her tree anyway, so it would be a breeze to
>>commit them along with the rest...
>>
>>Any thoughts?
> 
> It's fine with me *if* the Makefiles are really machine independent...
> I'm not sure...
> 

Well, they are architecture independent, but there are other problems:

CVS doesn't maintain the order of the timestamps. This will screw up
things, since the source files (like Makefile.in) will often look newer
than 'Makefile'. configure will detect this and try to regenerate stuff, 
and then we will have a newer version of configure, Makefile.in and 
Makefile each time we commit - it really pollutes the repository... (I 
know, because we tested it that way first :-)

There is the ./bootstrap command that runs all things for you once you
have the autotools installed; an alternative is if somebody would like
to setup a script to make automatic snapshots of CVS. (I.e., check it
out once a week, see if there are any changes, bootstrap, make dist,
and put it on the ftp server).

Cheers,

Erik