autoreconf on build

[Simo Sorce]

On Sat, 24 Jan 2015 21:15:11 +0000
"Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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.

I have a number of packages that do this for .. reasons ... and every
time rawhide uses a new automake some of them have issues :(

So it is not an effort free recommendation, and should be done
carefully.

> > 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.

Which, you may not always be able to address timely, and osme times it
makes no sense to, because the changer is a gratuitous one, in one of
the autotools.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York