Calling autoconf in a spec.

[Kevin Kofler]

Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> There's a big difference between having the upstream, who knows their
> configure script inside and out,

That's a very bold assertion. ;-) Many upstream developers just copy&paste 
their configure.ac scripts together from examples or other projects without 
understanding them. The current maintainer might also not be the developer 
who wrote the scripts (who is often the only one understanding them).

Case in point: There are bazillions of projects testing for the existence of 
standard ANSI C89 / ISO C90 (not C99, C90!) functions (which have been 
available on every even remotely modern OS for decades) in their configure 
scripts, then just ignoring the results of the checks and just using memcpy 
etc. without a second thought (which makes sense because those are part of 
an ubiquitous, 23-year-old standard, but then checking for them in configure 
and defining unused HAVE_MEMCPY etc. booleans does NOT make sense). 
Likewise, projects routinely check for the existence of a Fortran compiler 
without even including a single line of Fortran.

        Kevin Kofler