[gmx-developers] AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(tar-ustar)

[Erik Lindahl]

Hi,

On Jul 21, 2008, at 9:41 PM, David van der Spoel wrote:

> Roland Schulz wrote:
>> Hi,
>> why is the tar-ustar paremeter used in configure.ac <http://configure.ac 
>> >?
>> Occording to the automake Options documentation this ustar is only  
>> required for filenames longer than 99 characters. All files are  
>> shorter. Thus the default should be OK. The advantage is that  
>> without ustar it works also with older versions of automake. The  
>> rest is compatible.
>
> Isn't this necessary for long paths?
> If you go src/gmxlib/nonbonded/etc. you may get to 99
> But removing it and running make distcheck will tell us whether it  
> works...

David is correct - the limit applies to the entire path including the  
top-level directory where the CVS version in the name can be pretty  
long.

In principle you might be able to squeeze it in right now by renaming/ 
abbreviating a couple of directories, but IMHO we should go in the  
direction of making the code more readable, modularized  
(subdirectories), and longer/explicit names instead ;-)

Cheers,

Erik