Suggested packaging guideline: avoid running autoreconf

Steve Grubb sgrubb at redhat.com
Sat Oct 11 19:43:20 UTC 2008


On Saturday 11 October 2008 15:18:33 Braden McDaniel wrote:
> That is, generally, the right idea.  However, autoreconf is a bit of a
> sledgehammer and can result in a patch that is larger than necessary.
> The only files that should need patching are configure and Makefile.in.
> autoconf will produce the former, and automake the latter.

There's been a number of occasions where I patch Makefile.am because its a 1 
liner and patching Makefile.in makes a very ugly patch that becomes harder to 
read. Examples of this is adding files to be compiled in, removing files to 
be compiled in, or making something optional for a configure flag. So, if you 
know what you are doing, its fine to patch configure.ac or Makefile.am.

On the otherhand...there are also a number of projects that use libmissing. We 
do not carry that in Fedora. That means that any project using libmissing, 
you always have to patch Makefile.in and not Makefile.am since autoreconf 
won't be able to find the m4 macros for gnulib. We should probably carry 
gnulib sooner or later.

-Steve




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