Status of libtool 2.2.X?

[Kevin Kofler]

Till Maas <opensource <at> till.name> writes:
> Afaik, it is best practices to create a patch for upstream agains 
> configure.ac, then run autoreconf etc. locally and then create a diff between 
> the upstream tarball and the new contents and use this in the spec file, 
> which would be a patch agains configure. Then you do not need to run 
> autoreconf in rpmbuild.

But unless you manage to find the exact same versions of the autotools upstream 
used (which are in general not packaged for Fedora at all), the patch will be 
huge and contain lots of bogus changes due to the autotools version change. For 
example, autoconf often adds support for some exotic target or a workaround for 
some obscure shell's bug from one minor version to the next and that support 
code or workaround gets copied up to dozens of times into the generated 
configure script. Also things like copyright dates and revision numbers appear 
at many places. So a diff for the generated files can be huge even with _no_ 
change to the sources, and the actual change will be hidden in the mess. 
Patches of that kind also have to be regenerated at every single new upstream 
version.

In most cases, patching generated files is a bad idea.

        Kevin Kofler