On Tue, Sep 12, 2000 at 12:06:03PM -0500, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> Wow, this project marks my initial exposure to developing with
> autoconf and automake... but so much is going on in the land of
> "building", that I feel like I've already lost grasp. :)
>
> Greg, can you explain exactly what "maintainer mode" does, when passed
> to ./configure?
First, I'll point out we have three groups of people:
1) users of prebuilt binaries
2) people configuring and compiling for their system
3) developers of SVN itself
Side note: the ./configure script is generated; this is the primary
difference between (2) and (3) -- the former gets the distribution with a
configure script, while the latter needs to build it from configure.in.
In any case... as developers of the system, we want to see much more
information and warnings from our builds of SVN (compared to (2)). We also
don't mind if SVN builds slightly different, to assist our development and
debugging needs.
The --with-maintainer-mode sets up those extras for us. Specifically:
*) more warning switches to GCC
*) set the SVN_DEBUG macro that SVN can key off of for add'l debug
functionality
*) set the AP_DEBUG macro (for mod_dav_svn) to pick up similar debug
features when it includes Apache headers
We also have a --with-debug switch. This is intended for groups (2) and (3).
It turns on the -g switch, turns off -O... (and turns on -Wall if gcc).
--with-maintainer-mode is a superset of --with-debug (e.g. it also sets -g
-Wall).
Since group (3) are the only people to run autogen.sh, that is why I
included the recommendation for using --with-maintainer-mode. We should all
be using it so that we get GCC warnings from the builds. I suspect a few of
the recent "unused variables" or whatever are due to people not using the
maintainer-mode switch.
[ note that we used to always have -Wall in the builds, but that became
optional when --with-debug and --with-maintainer-mode were added ]
Is there a place to document this better? ... Ah. Note to self: update the
HACKING file.
Cheers,
-g
--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:08 2006