waf, git, EPOCH, version strings, ...

[Hal Murray]

There may be some confusion between comments about what exists and what I'd 
like.

> Yes.  People forgetting to run configure is a persistent problem.

Eric: An item for your list.

I don't have any good suggestions for how to fix that.  I think it could also 
happen if a tarball was extracted on top of an existing working directory, 
but the tarball probably isn't setup that way.


>> configure sets up NTPSEC_VERSION_STRING
>> ntptime is the only useage.
> Seems like a different issue than detecting an old or unusable configure.
> Do you propose a tie-in? 

Only that the version and EPOCH stuff are currently tangled up with configure and I think we want to disconnect that.

Can we pass the EPOCH via something like -DEPOCH=xxx on the command line?

>> I'd like the version string to indicate that I'm running something
>> built with local edits that haven't been committed yet.
>Yes, that has been requested before, we just have not come up with a
>solution yet.  We need a way to tell if any source files are changes.

I'm willing to delete ntpd.o so it gets rebuilt and picks up a new EPOCH.  That's assuming we get EPOCH out of config.h and EPOCH is used for the version string.  (I put the delete step in a script.)


> Not very complicated yet.  Maybe we should ship a default "install.sh" that
> does all that needs to be done.

"install" seems like a bad choice.  I don't want it to include the install step.  I might want to poke around a bit first.  How about update.sh?  It would do a git pull, then rm -r build or git distclean or whatever.

It may be better to not actually include that file.  That makes it hard to customize.  Maybe ship it without execute permissions and/or with a hard to type name, suggesting that it be copied over to something that can be customized.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.