On Sunday 05 July 2009 11:24:43 am Sam Varshavchik wrote: > Conrad Meyer writes: > > On Sunday 05 July 2009 07:45:46 am Sam Varshavchik wrote: > >> *snip* > >> > >> With a subsequent release, you'll still > >> have to rebase your existing patch, if the new release did not fix the > >> original bug. As I understand, rpm's default settings now reject fuzz in > >> patch files, so you'll just have to do it, now. And since the likelyhood > >> of configure changing in a new release is no different than any other > >> source file getting changed, on average, believing that some work can be > >> saved just by choosing to patch a different file, then the one that > >> really needs to be patched, is somewhat naive. > > > > The problem is that configure scripts are not written by a human, but > > generated by autoconf. It is easy to make small changes to configure.ac > > and generate large changes in configure. This makes it easier to rebase > > patches against configure.ac. > > The macros in configure.ac generally expand out to canned shell script > fragments, with the macro's parameters substituted somewhere. Changing a > parameter in configure.ac usually results in an equivalent substitution in > configure. Right. Still, it makes more sense to patch the original source than the generated result, I think. > Generally, only when one adds or removes entire macros from configure.ac, > that's when this results in wholesale changes to configure. > > In my experience, the overwhelming majority of fixups to configure scripts > involve nothing more than adjusting someone's pathname, or compiler flags. > For this kind of scope, rebuilding the entire configure script is overkill, > and I wouldn't do it unless I audit it and verify whether or not upstream > is relying on some specific behavior in the specific version of autoconf > that was used to build the original configure script. Patching the > configure script is much safer than patching configure.ac, then have > autoconf grok all .m4 macros and rebuild the whole thing, likely ending up > with a completely different beast, that not only includes your changes but > who knows what else. Unrelated, but I think this sort of phobia of regenerating an auto-generated script just goes to show how completely broken autotools is. Regards, -- Conrad Meyer <cemeyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
