dist target differences between cmake and autotools

[Geert Janssens]

On zondag 9 juli 2017 22:56:57 CEST John Ralls wrote:
> > On Jul 9, 2017, at 1:17 PM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I have tested the dist target in both cmake and autotools. I couldn't test
> > the autotools dist generated by cmake because my autotools is too recent.
> > So I have one tarball purely cmake and one tarball purely autotools.
> > 
> > There are a few missed files that should be fixed on both sides I believe.
> > Those are easy to fix by comparing a diff of the tarball content lists.
> > 
> > The more interesting issue is though that the autotools based dist tarball
> > doesn't contain a single CMakeLists.txt or the related cmake support
> > files.
> > And the other way around the cmake tarball doesn't contain the Makefile.in
> > files (it does include Makefile.am) and the typical autotools related
> > support files.
> > 
> > Perhaps the latter is because of the autotools-too-recent issue I
> > mentioned at the start.
> > 
> > I wonder though what our eventual goal is: should the dist tarball support
> > both cmake and autotools ?
> > 
> > Or put differently should the tarballs being output by the different
> > toolchains be identical and interchangeable ?
> > 
> > Or is it time to make a definitive choice of build system ?
> > 
> > I worry that if both toolchains generate dist tarballs that are not the
> > same we will get mixups at some point and confusion as a result.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > 
> > Geert
> > 
> > P.S. I have attached the contents of the two tarballs I have created with
> > today's master for comparison.<cmake.lst><autotools.lst>
> 
> I don't think it's because your autotools are "too recent", I think it's
> because there are some problems with running the autotools part of cmake
> distcheck on master. That step is required for creating the Makefile.in-s.
> 
This has me confused.

Shouldn't distcheck start with running "dist" to generate the tarball which is then unpacked and 
used as source for a "check" run ?

If so and assuming we agree on supporting two build systems, I would conclude the dist step in 
a cmake environment should already include the Makefile.in files in the tarball, because those 
are also included when running make dist via autotools. There are a few other files generated 
during autogen.sh that are also shipped in the autotools generated dist tarball. To keep the 
discussion focussed I'm not going to mention all of them, but obviously they should get the 
same treatment.

When I run dist after configuring my environment using cmake with default options and the 
ninja build system I get this error:
$ ninja-build dist 

The only way for me to have a cmake/ninja based environment generate a dist tarball is to 
configure using cmake -DAUTOTOOLS_IN_DIST=OFF

So that's why I said "my automake is too recent" and I can't get a dist tarball including the 
autotools related generated files.

Am I missing something here ?

Geert