Suggested packaging guideline: avoid running autoreconf

[Kevin Kofler]

Braden McDaniel <braden <at> endoframe.com> writes:
> Rather than patching configure.[ac,in] and Makefile.am, a more resilient
> approach is to patch the configure script and Makefile.in files.

Patching only the generated files is a hack which cannot be submitted upstream, 
so usually you end up with a patch which touches both source files and 
generated files, and that's a very fragile approach as:
* often you have to run "touch" on generated files which are not affected by 
the source change at all, because otherwise the autotools will try to be 
smarter than you and regenerate everything because not all generated files are 
up to date, and fail if the required autotools for regenerating everything are 
not there, and
* such patches generally have to be copied from the sources to the generated 
files by hand, because (as I explained in the other thread) regenerating them 
generally results in huge patches due to subtle autotools version differences, 
which then fail to apply to new upstream versions.

(This is exactly why generated files in source tarballs are a major PITA and 
the autotools are broken by design.)

        Kevin Kofler