Horst H. von Brand wrote:
Ralf Corsepius <rc040203@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
Correct - I didn't mean to offend Tom, but it's obvious, that some
people around in this thread don't understand the autotools.
If people were understanding them, they would not run the autotools
inside of rpm.specs but would apply patches.
Please enlighten us.
AFAIU, the objective of autotools is to detect the environment's quirks
and configure the package accordingly. They were designed to take a set
of input files, and creating the configuration (and Makefile) for the
package on the fly.
Right.
In view of the above, it does make sense to run them when installing.
Exactly this is the misunderstanding: You run the generated files when
building a package, but are not supposed to run the generators.
As Fedora is (mostly) made up of new(ish) packages, so there should be
few problems with version skew.
In an ideal world, you would be right, there should not be much risks in
running the autotools when building
Real world, however is different:
* Like any other tool, some versions of the autotools contain bugs
=> Blindly rerunning the autotools at build time (esp. with different
versions as the original authors do) introduces non-determinims and
carries risks.
* Many (esp. older) configuration files (configure.in/ac, Makefile.am)
are only "appear to be working", while they actually are "plain broken".
Many of the syntax changes of the autotools' originate from tightening
the syntax to avoid such "silent bugs".
=> In many cases, an autotool upgrade will kill "formerly seemingly
working" configuration files.
* Many configurations are not prepared for "autoreconf" etc.
E.g. GCC, binutils, gdb, firefox ... fall into this category. Running
autoreconf kills them.
To cut a long story short: To assure deterministic builds, you must not
run the autotools when building.
Ralf
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