You shouldn't edit configure, but the files used to generate it: configure.in for example.
Funny thing is the only thing I do differently than cpuminer-multi is, presumably, manually edit configure but noticed no
change in the building after doing so. I edit once every release with many make distclean before and after the edit. My changes
never get tossed so there must be something preventing make distclean from deleting configure and autogen.sh from
overwriting it, and it's nothing I've done.
I don't disagree philosophically with anything that has been said about it, but it's not my problem, I'm just doing what the
previous guy did. Since I didn't break it I can't fix it in the sense of putting it back the way I found it.
Also configure.in doesn't exist, configure.ac hasn't changed since October. I'd be shooting in the dark trying to figure it out.
if it didn't work immediately I'd be lost.
Make distclean will not touch configure, because configure generates makefiles.
https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Standard-Targets.htmlmake clean
Erase from the build tree the files built by make all.
make distclean
Additionally erase anything ./configure created.
Generating configure is one level of abstraction higher.
PS: I think the reason why editing configure gave you false impression that this is the right thing to do is because configure.ac you inherited from another fork uses AM_MAINTAINER_MODE. Which disables such checks.
https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/maintainer_002dmode.htmlSeveral years ago François Pinard pointed out several arguments against this AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro. Most of them relate to insecurity. By removing dependencies you get non-dependable builds: changes to sources files can have no effect on generated files and this can be very confusing when unnoticed. He adds that security shouldnt be reserved to maintainers (what --enable-maintainer-mode suggests), on the contrary. If one user has to modify a Makefile.am, then either Makefile.in should be updated or a warning should be output (this is what Automake uses missing for) but the last thing you want is that nothing happens and the user doesnt notice it (this is what happens when rebuild rules are disabled by AM_MAINTAINER_MODE).
Jim Meyering, the inventor of the AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro was swayed by Françoiss arguments, and got rid of AM_MAINTAINER_MODE in all of his packages.
emphasis mine.
Counter intuitively, the presence of that macro disables maintainer mode, and if you run ./configure --enable-maintainer-mode, then edit configure.ac (just change the version number from 1.2-dev), then run make, such edit will be detected and autoconf will be used to re-generate configure from its source file (configure.ac), effectively deleting all changes you did to that file because you were running in non-maintainer mode.