[asterisk-dev] Removing configure from tree

[Dennis Buteyn]

On 5/3/23 22:48, Joshua C. Colp wrote:
> Greetings all,
>
> Sean Bright brought up on IRC the removal of configure from git. This 
> may be impactful since some users (not necessarily developers) may not 
> understand the build system when building from branches (not tags or 
> releases) and become confused when configure is not present which is 
> why I disagreed with doing so on IRC. I'm curious though what others 
> think of such a change. I think to be acceptable it would need:
>
> 1. To regenerate configure if configure.ac <http://configure.ac> has 
> been changed, so that developers don't have a stale configure
> 2. To provide instructions if configure is not present and "make" is 
> run, I'm on the fence on automatically running it
> 3. Releases (and tags) would need to have a generated configure in them
>
> Thoughts?
Sean is correct that configure should not be present in the source tree 
because it contains build-environment specific parameters. For the same 
reason, Makefile should also not be present in the source tree.

Running make without configure being present would mean Makefile is also 
not present. As make is (fortunately) not sentient and does not know 
that Makefile is to be generated, it would reasonably state that no 
Makefile has been found. I'm not sure how one would convey additional 
instructions to users in such a case.

Many Automake/Autotools projects provide some bootstrap script to 
generate configure from configure.ac, with step-by-step instructions on 
how to build (bootstrap, configure, make).

To make building as simple as possible, instructions for building from a 
branch, tag or any other source should be identical.

I agree with Andrew that all documentation with build instructions 
should be updated accordingly.

-- 
Dennis Buteyn
Xorcom Ltd
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-dev/attachments/20230504/d79ec618/attachment.html>