[Zlib-devel] configure script

[John Bowler]

The problem, surely, is that zconf.h and Makefile are *both* machine
generated and source controlled.

The distributed versions of the files are under source control and are used
in some builds of zlib; IRC it is perfectly possible to build zlib with the
distributed zconf.h and I think certain builds of libpng do that.

In other builds, when the configure script is used, those files are
replaced.

This seems entirely reasonable to me.  One way round it is to make it so
that direct builds from the source repo are not permitted.  As I understand
it this is what Glenn does with libpng - the repo (which does not use git)
is used to generate a distribution from the original source files.  Some
work went into making it so that the distribution doesn't include
pnglibconf.h (the analog of zconf.h in this context), but the cost is that
Makefile users must copy a proforma pnglibconf.h to the normal, machine
generated, location.  (There is a rule in the Makefiles to do this.)

In the past a solution I've used under RCS for the Makefile issue is to
generate a file called, instead "makefile"; this takes priority over the
original Makefile.  Still, I don't know if configure can be, itself,
configured to generate "makefile".

John Bowler jbowler at acm.org
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