RE: "already configured" for dejagnu after gmake distclean.

[Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs@dmu.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Dave Korn wrote:

>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng
> > Sent: 29 March 2004 16:48
>
> > > state; you must have not distcleaned between the two
> > configures, and
> > > now you have makefiles
> >
> > I am absolutely positive that I did that distclean in
> > between, forseeing this problem if I didn't.  It is well over
> > a week ago though, and I don't have any evidence lying around
> > to prove this.
>
>   Well, it pretty much has to be the case; the evidence is all those
> generated files that were showing up as being in your source tree when you
> did the cvs update.  Every single one of those lines beginning '?' should
> not have been there.  Perhaps you did the reconfigure, then belatedly
> remembered about distclean and ran it, then re-reconfigured; if you'd

I don't think so, because I know that configure creates the
makefiles that would be used by the subsequent make.

> already started the reconfigure, however, it might have already rewritten
> the makefiles so that by the time you did the distclean it was deleting
> stuff from the object dir not the source dir.  It's hard to know how it
> first went wrong, but that's certainly the state it ended up in.
>
> > > in the source tree.  In theory, configure could be
> > protected against
> > > this, detect when generated files were found in the source
> > tree, and
> > > automatically do a distclean itself, but people don't often tend to
> > > switch from the one style of building to the other, so it
> > hasn't been done.
> >
> > I'd suggest that this is more common than might be thought,
> > because it is one of the often-suggested remedies to an
        [...]
>
>   I'm in full agreement with you.  AFAIC configure should flat-out refuse to
> run in the source tree.  It's nothing but a source of trouble and confusion.
> It could even be the case that 'make distclean' has a bug in it and hasn't
> been working properly when run in the source dir for some time, but nobody's
> noticed....

Would it be of any help to test this out, and point people at the
results?  I'm willing to do that.
>
>
>     cheers,
>       DaveK