Proposal for Sage 9.2: require "./configure" before "make"

[John H Palmieri]

Several of us are in favor of requiring that, in order to build Sage, people should have to run "./configure" before running "make". I would further propose that "make" should not itself then run "configure".

Some advantages:

- This is the same procedure used with many other software packages.

- Configuration should be done separately from building, and this makes that separation explicit.

- It would help to avoid the issue that ./configure gets run too often; for example, "make distclean" may cause ./configure to run.

Some disadvantages:

- It adds one step or a least requires the typing of some extra characters

- It's not what we're used to doing to build Sage.

Ticket #29316 proposes doing at least some of this, and Sage 9.2 seems like a good time to do this. Comments?

(https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/29316)

--

John

[VulK]

+1 for standard behaviour


* John H Palmieri <jhpalm...@gmail.com> [2020-04-18 13:51:29]:

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[Nils Bruin]

On Saturday, April 18, 2020 at 1:51:29 PM UTC-7, John H Palmieri wrote:

Some disadvantages:

- It adds one step or a least requires the typing of some extra characters

- It's not what we're used to doing to build Sage.

Isn't it possible to have a make target "make configure"?

Wouldn't it be possible to make this part of a "make cleanall", or whatever an appropriate metatarget is?

Is there some way to detect when  ./confiugre absolutely needs to be run, and make that part of some metatarget?

What I envision is that we can have both:

 * running ./configure; make works (and doesn't do way too much work)

 * running "make", or perhaps some target "make confbuild" works and runs configure.

There is of course the issue that make already runs loads of submakes of packages, that in turn must run ./configure, so in the sage build process, "./configure" is already commonly triggered by make. I don't think we'd want to change that, so it seems to me it makes sense to have "./configure" run under control of make for sage as well (under certain conditions).

[Matthias Koeppe]

On Saturday, April 18, 2020 at 1:51:29 PM UTC-7, John H Palmieri wrote:

Several of us are in favor of requiring that, in order to build Sage, people should have to run "./configure" before running "make". I would further propose that "make" should not itself then run "configure".

Well, "make" still needs to run configure (actually "./config.status --recheck && ./config.status), for example when configure.ac changes. Standard autotools packages also do that.

But what we should remove is the code leading to the call "./configure $$PREREQ_OPTIONS" in SAGE_ROOT/Makefile.

Matthias

[Matthias Koeppe]

On Saturday, April 18, 2020 at 2:11:09 PM UTC-7, Nils Bruin wrote:

There is of course the issue that make already runs loads of submakes of packages, that in turn must run ./configure, so in the sage build process, "./configure" is already commonly triggered by make. I don't think we'd want to change that

 

That's right, this would not be changed.

The proposed change is specifically about SAGE_ROOT/configure.

[Dima Pasechnik]

make should not trigger the "normal" run of main ./configure, as this
leads to various chicken vs egg problems, which can only be cured by
repeatedly triggering ./configure runs
all the time, As out ./configure is slow, this is a waste of time to have this.
We can of course create a special target that will trigger
./configure, but why defviate from the usual commonmy known
./configure && make ?

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[Jonathan Kliem]

Will this speed up the `make build` or `sage -br` process? It used to be really quick, but now it takes much longer and rechecks all the packages.

I really don't want this if I'm just changing a line of code to see, if this fixes my problem.

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[Matthias Koeppe]

On Sunday, April 19, 2020 at 6:32:35 AM UTC-7, Jonathan Kliem wrote:

Will this speed up the `make build` or `sage -br` process? It used to be really quick, but now it takes much longer and rechecks all the packages.

I really don't want this if I'm just changing a line of code to see, if this fixes my problem.

This may already be fixed by https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/29460

 

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 9:32 PM 'Jonathan Kliem' via sage-devel
<sage-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
> Will this speed up the `make build` or `sage -br` process? It used to be really quick, but now it takes much longer and rechecks all the packages.

exactly. That's the point, it will stop these extra ./configure runs.

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[David Roe]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 9:49 AM Dima Pasechnik <dim...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 9:32 PM 'Jonathan Kliem' via sage-devel
<sage-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
> Will this speed up the `make build` or `sage -br` process? It used to be really quick, but now it takes much longer and rechecks all the packages.

exactly. That's the point, it will stop these extra ./configure runs.

Then +1 from me.

David

 

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[Jonathan Kliem]

+1

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 4/18/20 4:51 PM, John H Palmieri wrote:
> Several of us are in favor of requiring that, in order to build Sage,
> people should have to run "./configure" before running "make". I would
> further propose that "make" should not itself then run "configure".

+1 step closer to sanity