[PATCH] Change autogen.sh scripts to respect NOCONFIGURE

[Colin Walters]

(Sorry for taking up people's time with the autogen.sh trivia, I know
 many of you have more important stuff to do, but once this lands I can
 use the fact that both GNOME and X.org do the same thing as leverage
 on smaller projects, and that helps me get much closer to my ideal
 of having a large swath of the "stuff between linux-kernel and GNOME"
 build in the exact same way.  I've already got mesa patched for
 example.)

On Thu, 2012-06-14 at 16:02 -0400, Gaetan Nadon wrote:

> That was one additional change I intended to make in the xorg modules,
> that is, using --force. Currently only the xserver and gtest uses it.
> The reason I wanted to switch all modules to use --force is in the case
> where the source is built with different versions of autotools. Of
> course it does not happen often, but it's quite a pain to investigate.

Sure, I have no opinion either way.  My build system simply *always*
builds from a clean git tree (i.e. git checkout <revision>; git clean
-dfx), so there are never existing files to override.

> Note that autogen.sh is not shipped in tarballs except in some modules
> where a controversy exists. I noticed the jhbuild system and the
> modular/build.sh looks at the presence of this file to make some
> decisions. I did as much reading as I could on the topic, I found that
> autogen.sh is a "legacy" script prior to the introduction of autoreconf
> as there were too many commands to type. It's not part of the GNU build
> system and isn't included in any GNU tarballs.

Right.  The complicating factor is basically that while
"autoreconf -vfi" is good enough for most people, in GNOME (not GNU) for
various reasons (mostly historical now), we've added additional things
that follow a "run in autogen.sh, include in make dist" model.  Namely,
gtk-doc and intltool.  See for example:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/glib/tree/autogen.sh?id=eda1735029e01d6391fe8a4cde6c5688727c8183#n27

And see also http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.embedded.poky/7153
where I discuss this with the OpenEmbedded/Yocto maintainer.

> It looks like the original patch at the top of the thread is still
> valid. It allows you to avoid any xorg internal issues as it only adds a
> test around the configure call. I could not get it to apply, however.
> Perhaps it is the attachment or something. Maybe using git send-email
> will help. Because of the --force difference, you'll need of path for
> the xserver (which can only be applied by Keith) and one for the rest of
> the modules. FYI I'll be away for a week tomorrow.

The patch I'm applying to most of X.org presently is:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-ostree/tree/patches/xorg-autogen.patch?id=7f36046a86695492ff7cc081e6ed6583f1aaa755