MySQL Bugs: #49256: autogen.sh should not run configure

Bug #49256	autogen.sh should not run configure
Submitted:	1 Dec 2009 12:08	Modified:	29 Jun 2011 14:55
Reporter:	Hartmut Holzgraefe	Email Updates:
Status:	Not a Bug	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Workbench	Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)
Version:	workbench-5.2 bzr	OS:	Linux (any)
Assigned to:		CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
The convention for autogen.sh is to take all the necessary steps to produce a working "configure" script, but it is not supposed to run ./configure, too.

This comes as a great surprise that should be avoided.

How to repeat:
Run autogen.sh and see how it runs configure, too.

Suggested fix:
Remove the part calling configure from autogen.sh

If there is really a need for a script running both steps then make it an additional one that does not use a commonly used name as autogen.sh 

Or at least change the logic in autogen.sh to require an environment variable to be set if you wan the non-standard "run configure" behavior instead of requiring a variable to be set to force standard behavior as it is now

Verified as described.

Triage:
This is minor and so by given rules P4.
But this is against familiar behaviours.
It is very confusing.

So I will agree with P3 here.

IO is much higher. The impact here is high. Also all distributors will get confused here.

Distributors usually start from a published source tarball which already contains a working "configure" script and do not the autotools chain to recreate the configure script ... unless the configure script itself needs some fix in which case they need to regenerated it from scratch ...

Ok, this seems to be more common with autogen.sh files than i thought (never ran into this before), but it is still a bad choice IMHO as there is no way 
to check for available configure parameters before running the autogen.sh
script as "configure --help" does not yet work due to the lack of the
to be generated configure script:

  http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook/autobook_43.html#IDX1

  autogen.sh
  
    From the outset, this is a poor name for a bootstrap script, since there 
    is already a GNU automatic text generation tool called AutoGen. Often 
    packages that follow this convention have the script automatically run 
    the generated configure script after the bootstrap process, passing
    autogen.sh arguments through to configure. Except you don't know what 
    options you want yet, since you can't run `configure --help' until
    configure has been generated. I suggest that if you find yourself 
    compiling a project set up in this way that you type:

     	$ /bin/sh ./autogen.sh --help

    and ignore the spurious warning that tells you configure will be executed.