[Libreoffice] Do we really want to use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE?

Niko Rönkkö ronkko at iki.fi
Sat Nov 6 21:09:23 PDT 2010


It's only used in outer configure and:

"Several years ago François Pinard pointed out several arguments against
 this AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro. Most of them relate to insecurity. By
 removing dependencies you get non-dependable builds: changes to sources
 files can have no effect on generated files and this can be very
 confusing when unnoticed. He adds that security shouldn't be reserved
 to maintainers (what --enable-maintainer-mode suggests), on the
 contrary. If one user has to modify a Makefile.am, then either
 Makefile.in should be updated or a warning should be output (this is
 what Automake uses missing for) but the last thing you want is that
 nothing happens and the user doesn't notice it (this is what happens
 when rebuild rules are disabled by AM_MAINTAINER_MODE).

 Jim Meyering, the inventor of the AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro was swayed
 by François's arguments, and got rid of AM_MAINTAINER_MODE in all of
 his packages."

Quoted from:
http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/automake/maintainer_002dmode.html


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