an update to automake-1.11?

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Sun Jul 5 21:17:29 UTC 2009


On Sun, Jul 05, 2009 at 04:37:02PM +0200, Till Maas wrote:
> On Sun July 5 2009, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> 
> > There's been lots of previous discussion of this silly idea of
> > patching generated code.  You end up carrying enormous patches
> > containing just line number changes that often can't be applied
> > upstream, and can't be carried forward to new upstream releases --
> > what on earth use is that?  And still no one has explained coherently
> > why the sky will fall if we patch configure.ac and Makefile.am and
> > just rerun autoconf/automake in the specfile.
>
> There is also the third alternative to patch configure.ac and
> Makefile.am, send the patches upstream, then run autoconf/automake
> once to get a patch for the upstream tarball and use this patch
> inside the spec. The patch in the spec may still be big, but it does
> not hurt anyone afaics.

But WHY!??!!!

Why is it bad to patch configure.ac and rerun the autotools stuff?  I
do this all the time and it doesn't fail, even when we upgrade
autotools mid-release.

Please someone explain why this is bad.  It's totally stupid to go to
all this extra effort and carry huge patches against what are
essentially binary files, unless there's a really _really_ good reason
for it.

Rich.

-- 
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