Re: problems with readline (compilation on mac fails)

[Ethan A M. <sf...@us...>]

> Hans-Bernhard Br�ker wrote:
> On 17.02.2011 22:48, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> > On Wednesday, February 16, 2011 03:38:13 pm Hans-Bernhard Br�ker wrote:
> 
> >> That's not really supposed to happen.  There's code in the Makefiles
> >> that automatically builds everything, including configure itself,
> >> whenever any of the files it's made from change.
> 
> > Actually, I do not see any such depency or target in the Makefiles.
> 
> They're there (see the top-level Makefile, look for am__configure_deps 
> and its uses), but they're disabled.  You actually disabled those 
> yourself, Ethan, when you put the AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro into 
> configure.in.
> 
> Now people need to run configure with --enable-maintainer-mode to get 
> back those rules, but since neither ./prepare nor any of the README 
> files mentions this fact, just about everybody, including yourself, 
> missed that.  IMHO that rather convincingly proves that 
> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE is a bad idea, and I suggest we take back that change.

I myself do not care much one way or the other, but if we remove 
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE then I predict we will get complaints in the other
direction.   Right now anyone who has a working configure file can continue
to use it even if they don't have autotools installed.  If we make
"maintainer mode" the default, then these people will be forced to install
autotools before they can build from current source.  Fine, they can do that.
But meanwhile we'll get a stream of complaints/queries/bug-reports that say
"I've had no trouble building gnuplot from source in the past, but now all
of a sudden it gives me error messages about missing autoconf packages".

	Ethan