On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 11:47 +0200, Enrico Scholz wrote:
Ralf Corsepius rc040203@freenet.de writes:
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE suppresses the deps we are discussing here.
This allows people to get away with packages containing broken timestamps, which introduces risks to upstreams if not handled with care and is unhandy for upstream usage.
When you are upstream, you have probably mechanism/scripts to call configure with special parameters (e.g. adding '-g3' to CFLAGS, setting a writable '--prefix', setting another CC). Putting an '--enable-maintainer-mode' there does not harm.
My problem is a bit different (cf. below).
I am upstream maintainer of a package, which uses AM_MAINTAINER_MODE. The most frequently answered question related to building issues is: "Did you pass --enable-maintainer-mode?"
Reducing stability (-> occasional autotool invocations in uncontrolled environments) and removing features (-> ability to patch configure) just to avoid some support requests is a bad deal.
People (developers) are working on CVS check outs and wonder why the Makefile don't do what they expect rsp. why their autotool-generated files don't get updated, when rebuilding their works.
Cause: They forgot --enable-maintainer-mode.
Ralf