Re: RFC: add a dummy "configure" to the packaging templates

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Frédéric L. W. Meunier wrote:

> On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>
> > Many a time I've come across a project that only has a Makefile, with no
> > configure.  To allow those projects to build outside of the source
> > directory, I usually had to either change the build script's conf() rule
> > or add a dummy configure script to copy all the files to the build
> > directory.  I'm thinking of creating one generic version of such a script,
> > and putting it in CVS with the packaging templates.  Comments?
>
> What does this buy is ? Why not just use lndir ?

A couple of reasons.  First, lndir is not always available, and I'd hate
to make developers install the whole XFree86-bin package just to build,
say, wtf.  Secondly, lndir doesn't have the same invocation semantics as
configure, so we'd have to change the generic-build-script yet again to
accomodate it.  I'd rather include a dummy configure that does the "right
thing" (i.e., populates the build directory with enough files to be able
to build the package there).  If it makes you feel better, we could put in
some code to detect whether lndir is available and if it is, use it under
the covers.
	Igor
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