Sometimes due to the SCM not strictly remembering the timestamp of files the generated Makefile will think that it needs to re-run "autoreconf -i" or equivalent to re-generate Makefile.in from Makefile.am, configure from configure.ac, etc..
How do I prevent this?
I want to prevent it because it causes these problems:
- when creating a dist archive (git archive --format=tar ...) the timestamp will be incorrect and the problem will be there for end-users. Not cool.
- On slow systems this makes the compile take a lot longer, because it's no longer configure, make, make install, but configure, autoreconf -i, configure, make make install.
I know I can "touch" the generated files prior to making a dist tarball, but in my opinion that only solves the problem for the tarballs, not for developers. It's also an ugly hack to work around a misfeature that should just be turn-off-able. Also, it breaks git archive, since the timestamps won't always be correct there anyway.
Other SCMs also have this, so the problem is not (IMO) with git.