The automake manual recommends against the use of disabling
maintainer mode by default:
https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#maintainer_002...
because when it is disabled, the user gets no indication if they
touch a file that would normally require a rebuild. Automake
1.11 changed things so that AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable]) will set
the mode to enabled by default; but RHEL 5 still uses automake 1.9,
where AM_MAINTAINER_MODE did not recognize an argument, and
therefore disables maintainer mode by default. Having the default
be different according to which version of automake built the
project is annoying, and I _have_ been bitten on RHEL 5 rebuilds
where the default disabled mode led to silently incorrect builds.
The automake manual admits that being able to disable maintainer
mode still makes sense for projects that still store generated
files from the autotools in version control; but we have dropped
that for several years now. As such, it's finally time to just
ditch the whole idea of maintainer mode, and unconditionally
rebuild autotools files if a dependency changes, without offering
a configure option to disable that mode.
* configure.ac (AM_MAINTAINER_MODE): Drop.
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake(a)redhat.com>
---
configure.ac | 1 -
1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index 7e357c4..024b0c8 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -24,7 +24,6 @@ AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])
dnl Make automake keep quiet about wildcards & other GNUmake-isms; also keep
dnl quiet about the fact that we intentionally cater to automake 1.9
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([-Wno-portability -Wno-obsolete tar-ustar subdir-objects])
-AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable])
# Maintainer note - comment this line out if you plan to rerun
# GNULIB_POSIXCHECK testing to see if libvirt should be using more modules.
--
1.8.3.1