[Gluster-devel] Why not provide useful config.guess and config.sub in gluster's release tarball

[Niels de Vos]

On Sun, Apr 02, 2017 at 04:58:38PM +0800, Zhengping Zhou wrote:
>       I have encountered a problem while trying to compile the
> release source tarball as usual :./confiugre;make;make install.
> It seems the Makefile generated by configure is not right and
> without any obvious error message.(Actually there are several
> warnings, such like "configure: WARNING: cache variable
> ac_cv_build contains a newline")
>       I found the parameters "host" and "build" in Makefile
> which should passed by user or detected by config.guess are
> wrong, because current config.guess in the  release tarball
> doesn't work as its explain in its content.
>       Maybe it is better not to provide default configure file in the
> release tarball directly, so the users will run ./autogen.sh to
> generate the right configure and config.guess.Or we can provide
> a useful config.guess as usual.

There is a little more information about this in
http://review.gluster.org/14503, the related bug
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1223937 and the 3.8 release notes at
https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/release-3.8/doc/release-notes/3.8.0.md#changes-to-building-from-the-release-tarball

It mainly boils down to providing support for distributions that do
builds for uncommon/new architectures. Including a config.guess and
config.sub in the repository means that someone needs to track the
upstream for those files. We have proven to be very bad at this (see the
contents in the contrib/ directory). Not including those files is a much
safer approach. Many distributions do not rely on those files in any
case, because they replace the files or call configure with all possible
parameters.

We do not expect users to build binaries from the tarball, but hope that
the version is made available by all distributions instead. Developers
can build directly from the git repository, and that should work fine
too.

Could you explain your need to build binaries from the release tarball,
and why you can not use the packages provided by the distribution you
use?

Thanks,
Niels
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/attachments/20170403/5369c7e8/attachment.sig>