mod_jk AM_MAINTAINER_MODE nightmares

["William A. Rowe Jr." <wr...@rowe-clan.net>]

Folks,

it is abusive to force all builds of mod_jk to invoke the whole
automake toolchain; it isn't practical to expect automake to work
on all platforms which mod_jk is happy to compile under.  Even the
root of automake, m4 itself, is often flakey under some of these
OS distributions.  Automake offers a flag, but we've failed to give
the user that choice.

As the AC maintainer-mode flag is not built into the mod_jk 
./configure it is IMPOSSIBLE to turn off without either 
1. hacking ./configure or 2. hacking the Makefile.  Hacks really
shouldn't be required, we would like people to use our files and
know what their machine had chosen to do.

I would strongly encourage us never to ship the jk connector pkg
with maintainer mode enabled by default.  It causes the user to
run with different ./configure script than the project tested when
the release vote happened.  But in any case we need to support the
flag to allow users to explicitly enable or disable the AM rebuild.

I'm happy to commit a change but please vote for your preferred
behavior in svn, since it is a contentious choice (simply google
for AM_MAINTAINER_MODE for a host of debates on the topic);

  [ ]  AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable])  [default to re-automake]
  [ ]  AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([disable]) [default to not re-automake]
  [ ]  no AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro   [status quo, no choices]

[An additional option would be to have the jkrelease script munge
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable]) into AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([disable]) at
release tarball time before invoking automake, but that would take
someone more familiar with jkrelease, such as a recent RM, to verify 
that the entire process is behaving correctly.]

Additionally, we overload the maintainer-mode with -DDEBUG/-Wall.
That probably should change.  Although that is httpd's definition
of maintainer-mode, httpd is not an automake project (for many well
thought-out reasons).  The incidental decision to be made is;

  [ ]  Overload --enable-maintainer-mode  [status quo]
  [ ]  Rename jk's -DDEBUG -Wall flag to --enable-debugging-mode

Note that flags come 'for free' if building mod_jk against an httpd
./configure[d] --enable-maintainer-mode - no jk option required.
But that doesn't solve the flags for non-httpd based jk connectors.


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