autoreconf on build

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 01/24/2015 03:14 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>
> I notice that Debian recently [since July 2014] started to recommend
> that packagers run autoreconf on build.  Their reasons are given here
> and seem to be good ones:
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf
>
> In the interests of fairness I can think of two drawbacks too:
>
>   - newer versions of (especially) automake have not always been
>     improvements, and some upstreams may wish to stick with older ones
>
>   - autoreconf is slow
>
> Debian have probably hit most of the bugs by now, and I think this is
> a good recommendation that perhaps Fedora packagers should be
> encouraged to follow too.  What do you think?
This is bad advice.

Autoreconf only works if a package has been prepared for it and if a 
package is actively maintained.

In many other cases autoreconf can cause subtile and hard to find 
issues. In complex cases, it doesn't work at all.

Ralf