Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 26, 2020 17:33 UTC (Mon) by bpearlmutter (subscriber, #14693)
In reply to: Building from source to include running autoconf? by jwarnica
Parent article: Rejuvenating Autoconf

Unless the software generates a library, or installs a slew of different sorts of support files and documentation, or any of a dozen other things that are really hard to get right in a Makefile.

Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 26, 2020 17:40 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (9 responses)

Perhaps in 2020 we should give up on the idea that the software installs documentation into /usr/share/doc? Who really bothers to go and look in there rather than going online?

I support the idea of a known release version which has a known set of documentation, and keeping the documentation under version control alongside the source code. It can of course be included in the git checkout or the tarball. It just doesn't need to be 'installed' in some creaky location where you might have found it on your minicomputer 30 years ago.

I have to admit I do like to read manual pages, so perhaps I'm being inconsistent here, but there is surely a simpler way to do things.

The general point you make about building libraries is entirely valid of course.

Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 26, 2020 17:50 UTC (Mon) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link] (8 responses)

Online is great. Until you discover the online documentation describes a (much newer or sometimes older) version of the software than what's actually provided by your distro, and installed on your computer.

Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 26, 2020 18:19 UTC (Mon) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link] (2 responses)

Its not like its hard to build a website that handles multiple versions of documentation. Sure, there are cases of high security facilities with zero Internet access, but more often I want to read documentation where I don't have access to the running system then I have access to a system and no internet access.

Anyway, for the nuts and bolts of building documentation, I'm more comfortable with telling some end sysadmin "we really don't support that obscure system, just read the docs online if you can't build it" then I would be trying to support their 48bit systems from 1987.

man pages are nice for online quick reference. But for "documentation", you really need documentation.

Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 27, 2020 6:19 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

There's plenty of "Internet access is nonexistent / slow / expensive as hell" corners left in today's world. Don't blindly assume that everybody is as WEIRD as you are. (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.)

Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 27, 2020 16:39 UTC (Tue) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link]

Well, maybe.

But that doesn't really change the base question that autoconf would unquestionably be the wrong tool to build that.

Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 26, 2020 19:16 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

Just as you should be able to trace back anything running on your system to the particular git revision it was built from, you should also be able to view the documentation as of that revision, since the documentation is stored in the same repository as the source. Or at the worst, browse the contents of the source package (rpm, deb, etc) your installed version was built from.

I share your frustration with online documentation but I think if we treat documentation as a kind of source code, it becomes an instance of the more general question 'how can I view source code for what's actually installed on my computer?', which is something that needs an answer anyway.

Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 26, 2020 19:38 UTC (Mon) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link]

'how can I view source code for what's actually installed on my computer?'

Indeed. Maybe once upon a time that answer involves remembering what tape you smuggled into a place, now it is answered by just answering it. If you can't answer it directly, or can't find the matching sourcecode, then you've got bigger problems than autoconf.

Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 27, 2020 0:46 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

Online is great. Until you discover the online documentation describes a (much newer or sometimes older) version of the software than what's actually provided by your distro, and installed on your computer.

Or your network is down. Or the problem you're trying to fix is with your networking or your browser. Or you're on some kind of metered connection and would like to avoid connecting to the network for everything. Or any of the other myriad reasons one might wish to avoid going online for everything. Putting everything online is great, but there's really no reason not to put documentation on the same computer as the software it's documenting.

Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 28, 2020 16:00 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> Online is great.

Until you discovcr that the *real* documentation is swamped by "howtos" written by people who don't know what they're doing and is chock full of subtle misunderstandings and errors.

(Case in point - it's less common now but the amount of sites that say "if your raid array is corrupted just re-create it" ... about as effective as "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/md-array" !!!)

Cheers,
Wol

Building from source to include running autoconf?

Posted Oct 28, 2020 16:18 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

Hey, I've done dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/md-array before. Of course that was deliberately filling an array with random junk before making an encrypted disk, so I was actually intending to fill my drive with junk.