A Greeting for Xapian community

Olly Betts olly at survex.com
Sun Mar 3 19:15:53 GMT 2019


On Sun, Mar 03, 2019 at 05:13:09PM +0000, James Aylett wrote:
> On 3 Mar 2019, at 17:01, Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:
> 
> > I suspect what's going on here is that bootstrap will by default
> > download, build and install (into a subdirectory of the build tree) any
> > of the autotools for which suitable versions aren't already installed.
> > They have documentation in texinfo format, so if they don't ship the
> > generated .info files they would probably fail without makeinfo.
> > 
> > It probably works for James because he has suitable versions already
> > installed so bootstrap doesn't try to build its own.
> 
> If this is what's going on, it's probably autoconf. My source/INST/bin
> contains automake and aclocal (1.16) and libtool all built today, but
> autoconf there is 2.69 (which matches my system version — not sure why
> it was installed, so I assume that's from a while ago; system automake
> is 1.15, so bootstrap would need to pull the more recent one).

We used to unconditionally build local versions, so probably the autoconf
install is from before this change:

commit d02244d93a05d6392648ffbe2089e8aed530f03b
Author: Olly Betts <olly at survex.com>
Date:   Fri Dec 23 16:34:17 2016 +1300

    Use installed autotools if new enough
    
    The rate of release has slowed a lot, and a modern distro probably
    comes with new enough versions, so carefully download and building
    them is a waste of time, bandwidth and diskspace for many people.

In fact we currently have some patches to apply to automake and libtool,
so those currently always get built (unless you pass bootstrap option
--download-tools=never).  I've tried to push these upstream, but they
didn't get accepted yet.

Cheers,
    Olly



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