On Tue, Oct 09, 2012 at 09:27:46AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > On Mon, 2012-10-08 at 12:26 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > > > Personally, I've already started converting every package I maintain that > > uses Autoconf to using dh_autoreconf during the build. > > Likewise. > > > I wonder if that isn't a better long-term solution for Debian. > > It is, but for DFSG item 2 reasons rather than this. As a solution for > this in Debian and outside Debian I don't think it scales as well. > Within Debian we would need to make everything use debhelper and make > debhelper do it by default, neither of which are likely. There are quite > a few distros, including proprietary ones, so I don't think this > approach scales outside of Debian either. >... One problem is that in new upstream versions of autoconf/automake/libtool there are sometimes slight incompatibilities, and you end up with shipping many different versions of each of these tools (even today Debian already ships 5 different versions of autoconf). E.g. putting automake 1.13 [1] as automake package into Debian would then require updating thousands of packages just for getting the whole archive to build again. > bye, > pabs cu Adrian [1] That will remove quite a few things marked as obsolete. -- "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days. "Only a promise," Lao Er said. Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf