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Ethereal-dev: Re: [ethereal-dev] Libtool changes checked in

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 01:28:31 -0800
> 	I'm one of developer so I'm supposed to change those:-), but this time
> 	I did not change anything.  since "configure" is not in cvs tree
> 	I need to generate "configure" script, I needed to generate it
> 	by my own.

Yes, but you're presumably building from the CVS tree, not from a
tarball - if you plan to built from the CVS tree, you first have to run
"autogen.sh", which requires that you have autoconf and automake, and
now libtool, installed.

As per other mail, we really need to provide developer's documentation
to mention stuff such as that.

> >"autoconf"
> >etc.  are supposed to produce configure scripts, etc.  that don't
> >require you to have "autoconf", "automake", etc.  around - and, when I
> >tried building from a distribution tarball with "autoconf" and
> >"automake" installed, but without "libtool" installed, it seemed to
> >work.
> 
> 	For non-developers who grabbed tar.gz file, I hope so.
> 
> 	From my past experience with automake-generated Makefile, I tend to
> 	believe that aclocal, autoheader and other tools will be mistakingly
> 	invoked by some file timestamp skew if you have those tools.  If any
> 	of those tools get called, it is required to have libtool.

Presumably when the tarball is built, the time stamps on autogenerated
stuff are later than the time stamps from the stuff from which they were
generated, so, unless "tar" can't or doesn't extract the time stamps
from the tarball, that shouldn't be a problem.  Are there platforms on
which that happens?  (The tarball is made in one directory, so there
shouldn't be an issue of timestamp skew due to the machine on which the
tarball is being built being out of sync with a file server - assuming
whoever builds the tarball is even using a file server.)

There may be timetamp problems if you check the source into RCS or CVS
or Perforce or... yourself, but if you're doing that you might be a
developer - if not, you should just touch the autogenerated files. 
(This is a general problem - many bits of GNU software whine that
"texinfo" isn't installed if the ".info" files have an earlier timestamp
than the ".texi" files due to, for example, checking the source into a
source control system.)

I don't think we should tell people to drag in the full panoply of GNU
auto* stuff if all they want to do is build and install Ethereal on a
platform for which there aren't binary distributions.