status of snapshots

Snapshots are currently broken.  That includes the automatically
generated nightly snapshot for CVS HEAD and for the patched version of
the release (0.82).  It is also why there's no release candiate yet.  

Snapshots stopped working when I upgraded my autotools, in March.
I prefer not to upgrade those tools near a new release, but
the build box hardware was failing and starting over with updated tools
was the shortest distance between two points.  

One of the nonjoys of inglorious maintainerhood is the opportunity to
spend hours bamboozled by toolchain scripts.  That was my fate
tonight, because I see it's rather urgent for a few people to get
snapshots back online.  But the automake gods were not amused, and
"make dist" remains thoroughly borked.  

If you want to try your hand at it, fetch a fresh copy from CVS HEAD
and "make dist".  You'll need:

$ tools
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.65
automake (GNU automake) 1.11.1
ltmain.sh (GNU libtool) 2.2.6b

You will eventually see:

	cp: ../freetds-0.92.dev.20110408/doc/images/important.gif: No
such file or directory

The message comes from a loop in the disdir target of doc/Makefile. If
you lean hard on make(1), you'll also see:

+ .././install-sh -c
-d ../freetds-0.92.dev.20110408/doc/doc/freetds-0.92.dev.20110408 ../freetds-0.92.dev.20110408/doc/images ../freetds-0.92.dev.20110408/doc/images/callouts

but as far as I can tell, install-sh doesn't process multiple targets.
And just try to find what $PWD is when that fails.  Go ahead, I'll
wait.  

It could well be we're abusing automake in ways that used to be OK.
Building documentation isn't something afaict that automake fully
subscribes to, a situation complicated by my determination to let
people build the documentation from the tarball sources should they so
desire.  There aren't many hooks for "make dist" to tell it about the
UG subdirectories.  

Mind, *building* from CVS works just dandy.  It's only generating the
snapshot that's a problem.  For the time being, at least.  

--jkl