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

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 6, 2009, 19:25 UTC
Message-ID: <20090206192505.GE19494@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vd4dv7tb3.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, Feb 06, 2009 at 02:28:48AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> > Er ... I was not doing so.  I was saying that if one is going to use
> > autoconf with git, one should use a non-ancient version.
> 
> That is nice but the statement is only half-truth, and should be followed
> by ", but why bother?  You do not even need to use configure to build
> git, and insn is all here...".

I can think of one obvious reason why one might bother with autoconf: he knows that git builds using the configuration detected by autoconf, but it does not without. So yes, he _can_ tweak the Makefile manually to get git to build, but he doesn't necessarily know which knobs to tweak. And autoconf does.

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. There are people who may want to build git from a clone but who _don't_ want to spend time learning about every tweakable build knob or about how much their platform sucks.

-Peff