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

[Zhengping Zhou]

    I have a test environment without  internet connection. I'd like
to build and install many packages from the tarball which downloaded
from the official website.
    Generally, the tarball will provide a useful configure  file, I
mean which can generate the right makefile, or there will be no
default configure file(only configure.ac),
which means i should run auto_gen.sh to get configure.
    But it puzzles me that the tarball provides a configure file which
cann't generate a right Makefile without any obvious error info. So
why not just don't provide
a configure file in the tarball, so the users will run auto_gen.sh to
get  one just like the developer in git environment.Or maybe you can
provide a useful config.guess
and config.sub in the tarball as I suggested in the last email.

Thanks,
Zhengping

2017-04-03 17:05 GMT+08:00 Niels de Vos <ndevos at redhat.com>:
> 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