autoreconf on build

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 07:42:20PM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 01/24/2015 03:14 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >
> >I notice that Debian recently [since July 2014] started to recommend
> >that packagers run autoreconf on build.  Their reasons are given here
> >and seem to be good ones:
> >
> >https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf
> >
> >In the interests of fairness I can think of two drawbacks too:
> >
> >  - newer versions of (especially) automake have not always been
> >    improvements, and some upstreams may wish to stick with older ones
> >
> >  - autoreconf is slow
> >
> >Debian have probably hit most of the bugs by now, and I think this is
> >a good recommendation that perhaps Fedora packagers should be
> >encouraged to follow too.  What do you think?
> This is bad advice.
> 
> Autoreconf only works if a package has been prepared for it and if a
> package is actively maintained.

... which would be a bug in the upstream package.  But yes I agree
this is possibly controversial.  On the other hand Debian likely will
have encountered these bugs before us.

> In many other cases autoreconf can cause subtile and hard to find
> issues. In complex cases, it doesn't work at all.

Again, bugs in the upstream package.

Rich.

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