On Sat, 24 Jan 2015 21:15:11 +0000
"Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones(a)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