On 2020-12-20 17:46 +0100, Bruno Haible wrote: > This patch is already in Gnulib since 2020-12-09. But when people > run 'autoreconf' on an existing released tarball, they are effectively > combining an older Gnulib with a newest Autoconf. > > Why do people do that? The point of tarballs is that you can run > './configure' right away. Because on balance, over the long term, it works better. This page explains why debian now does this by default: https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf We realise that it was/is not the autotools design, but that design only works well when the auto* bits get updated reasonably often. If they just get left (because the last relase was a decade ago) or copied over into releases but never actually updated for years and years (which often happens in practice) they can (and in my experience often do) get badly out of sync with the surrounding world. Testing that things build with the tools now, as opposed to the tools available when the tarball was generated, demonstrates that the software can still be built from source. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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