Subject: Re: Chicken/egg problem building from a 'git clone'

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:12:29 -0800

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> Now, in this case, it was only one tweak and other responders have
> already pointed him in the right direction. So just making that tweak
> manually is probably the sane thing to do in this situation.
>
> But I wanted to point out that autoconf is not totally without value
> here.

I am not saying something that strong, either.  If autoconf generated
configure works _for you_ without hassle, great.  Keep using it.

The original message that started this thread was what to do when it does
NOT work for you, and my point was in general it is much nicer to point at
the knob to tweak from the make invocation command line (or in config.mak)
than having you spend time on upgrade autoconf, generate configure and run
it.

Fanboys may say that autoconf generated configure is the greatest thing
since sliced bread.  But let's face it.  Honestly, the track record of
those people in keeping autoconf part in this project up-to-date has not
been all that great.  There are things that the generated configure file
does not detect nor configure correctly (we had --with-expat patch, and we
also saw "the trailing slash in template_dir definition in config.mak.in"
discussed fairly recently).  You are much better off tweaking known
peculiarity of your platform in config.mak, when configure does not work
out of box for you.