Re: ./configure

[ShengHuo ZHU <zsh@cs.rochester.edu>]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:

> * Didier Verna <didier@lrde.epita.fr>  on Mon, 30 Jul 2001
>|         Well, you actually *want* to keep configure in CVS because it is no
>| different from people to people, and it's somewhat insane to make
>| thousands of people regenerate the *same* file. It also has the advantage
>| that CVS simple users (not developers) don't have to know autoconf and
>| friends to build gnus.
> 
> "CVS versions" and "simple user" do not go together.  If you are using
> something out of a CVS tree then you are either a) an advanced user, b) a
> developer, or c) a tester, all three of which should have at least a basic
> understanding of how automake work.  If you are none of the above then you
> probably should not be using anything out of a CVS tree.
> 
> Besides "./autogen.sh" is not that difficult, and it runs configure for you
> automatically.  That is how most of the projects that I use out of CVS
> trees handle things.  The only one I don't is Mozilla, which has its own
> config mechanism.

Making ./autogen.sh is not difficult and some projects use that, but
Gnus is different, because we don't change configure.in frequently,
four times in 3.5 years.  In addition, we don't use automake, some
Gnus users don't have autoconf installed, and ./configure is in both
the Emacs CVS and the XEmacs CVS.  Why we bother?

ShengHuo