src/dejagnu/Makefile.am

[Michael Elizabeth Chastain <mec at shout dot net>]

I have this bug, PR gdb/708, where the snapshot tarballs do not build
at all.  This is a high priority bug.  I've verified that it still
happens with both gdb_5_3-branch and HEAD.

Here's the etiology.  Andrew C has been down this entire path before,
but I just want to lay it out.

  ss/make-snapshot script runs 'make -f src-release gdb+dejagnu.tar.gz'

  src-release walks the tree and configures all the subdirs and
  makes info files in them.

  src-release walks the tree and does 'distclean' to remove
  config.status and other files.

The problem is that src/dejagnu/Makefile.am is coded in an unusual way.
src/dejagnu has subdirectories, and the subdirectories are configured
normally, but Makefile.am does *not* list all the subdirectories!
There's a comment in Makefile.am that they do not want 'make all'
to actually build examples/calc and other stuff.

So 'configure' configures in dejagnu/example/calc, but 'make distclean'
never goes there, and the tarball gets some extra crap in it,
specifically dejagnu/example/calc/config.status.  Then the user tries
to build from the tarball and gets an error that dejagnu/example/calc
has already been configured and the build chokes.

There are two different ways to fix this:

(1) Just edit dejagnu/example/calc/Makefile.am and set SUBDIRS properly.

    In fact Andrew C has done that in the past (2000-04-19), but then
    this gets obliterated the next time someone imports dejagnu
    (Nick C, 2002-04-21).

(2) Work around the problem in Makefile.am with a 'distclean-local' goal.

    I wrote such a patch and it works for me.

The advantage of (1) is that it's simple and we've done it before.
And we don't import dejagnu very often.

The advantage of (2) is that we get something that is more likely
to be accepted if we submit it upstream.

I need some guidance on which path to follow.  Andrew?

Michael C