Possible autotools bug with in-source builds of 4.3.1 release tarball

[Matt Thompson]

All,

I recently downloaded 4.3.1 into a set of libraries I maintain for a weather model. What I usually do is build for one compiler/MPI stack, clean, distclean, and then build another compiler/MPI stack. And, with 4.3.1, something interesting happened: I couldn't!

It turns out when I did a make distclean, the file examples/tst_filter.sh was removed and so the next configure step died. I think it's because in examples/Makefile.in there is:

CONFIG_CLEAN_FILES = tst_filter.sh findplugin.sh

and CONFIG_CLEAN_FILES seems to be cleaned when make distclean is run...I think...autotools confuses me.

So, I did what I should have done before and look at the README and you recommend out-of-source builds. An added mkdir -p and a few edits and, voila, I can build multiple times. Huzzah!

In a way, it's not a bug since the instructions do say to do out-of-source builds. I don't know enough autotools to know if you can make it not do in-source builds (like you can with CMake), but I thought I'd pass this along.

PS: I will be moving to building the netcdf-c/fortran/cxx4 with CMake soon. It's just I know our code works and links with the autotools builds. If I go CMake, I'll want to change the install pattern for netcdf and that's bit longer term validation process. (Plus I can just clone/submodule the repo then and not need release tarballs!)

[Ward Fisher]

Thanks for the heads up; I'll get this taken care of!