autoconf and epel-5

[Dan Nicholson]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 7:58 AM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 01:07:44PM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>>
>>> ... plenty of surprises are lurking for you ;)
>>
>> You really need to back your assertions up with facts.
>
> OK, try to run autoreconf from Fedora 10 on newlib-1.15.0, gcc-3.x, firefox.
>
> These packages end up in a total mess when doing so. There actually are
> plenty of such cases out there. Almost all packages which still apply
> autoconf < 2.59 or automake < 1.7 have such problems.

I think the actual policy has to be handled on a case-by-case basis,
unfortunately. gcc and firefox have very specific usage patterns for
the autotools. They have to be handled with care, which probably means
patching the generated files or simulating the behavior of the
upstream bootstrap.sh/autogen.sh/whatever. IIRC, apr and xfsprogs
(among others) also use the autotools in a non-standard way. On the
other hand, all the hundreds of xorg packages are handled with
"autoreconf -iv".

I certainly understand where you're coming from, but I think the
policy should be "use autoreconf if you can". The big benefit being
that hopefully fixes can get back upstream so that the game can be
avoided with the next release.

--
Dan