Subject: Re: bug#11034: Binutils, GDB, GCC and Automake's 'cygnus' option

From: Stefano Lattarini <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:04:04 +0200

On 04/04/2012 03:17 PM, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Mar 2012, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> 
>> Note there's nothing I'm planning to do, nor I should do, in this regard:
>> the two setups described above are both already supported by the current
>> automake implementation (but the last one is not encouraged, even though
>> it makes perfect sense in some *rare* situations).  I was just pointing
>> out that you have to choose one of these setups -- so, if you want to
>> distribute info files, you must accept to have them build in the srcdir.
> 
> The approach used in GCC, for example in the libquadmath directory, is a 
> --enable-generated-files-in-srcdir configure option that is used when 
> building a release tarball - so normally the files go in the build 
> directory, but a special configuration is used to put them in the source 
> directory only when building releases.  (This does not involve the 
> "cygnus" option.)  I think support for that seems more generically useful 
> (and it makes sense to me for automake to look at features used in other 
> packages' configure/build systems, that aren't inherently specific to 
> those packages, and try to provide generic versions of them).
>
I agree, but for the moment being I'm just interested in ensuring the
removal of the 'cygnus' option won't impact too negatively on its last
relevant users (GCC, GDB, Binutils, and the bfd library).  So far it
appears this is the case luckily, so I'll go ahead with the deprecation
of 'cygnus' in Automake 1.12.1 and its removal in Automake 1.13.

Regards,
  Stefano