Re: [RFC] add regenerate Makefile target

[Simon Marchi <simark@simark.ca>]

On 3/18/24 13:25, Christophe Lyon wrote:
> Well the rule to regenerate Makefile.in (eg in in opcodes/) is a bit
> more complex
> than just calling automake. IIUC it calls automake --foreign it any of
> *.m4 file from $(am__configure_deps) that is newer than Makefile.in
> (with an early exit in the loop), does nothing if Makefile.am or
> doc/local.mk are newer than Makefile.in, and then calls 'automake
> --foreign Makefile'

The rules looks complex because they've been generated by automake, this
Makefile.in is not written by hand.  And I guess automake has put
`--foreign` there because foreign is used in Makefile.am:

  AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS = foreign no-dist

But a simple call so `automake -f` (or `autoreconf -f`) just works, as
automake picks up the foreign option from AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS, so a human
or an external script who wants to regenerate things would probably just
use that.

> The bot I want to put in place would regenerate things as they are
> supposed to be, then build and run the testsuite to make sure that
> what is supposed to be committed would work (if the committer
> regenerates everything correctly)

For your job, would it be fine to just force-regenerate everything and
ignore timestamps (just like the buildbot's autoregen job wants to do)?
It would waste a few cycles, but it would be much simpler.

Simon