Kevin Kofler writes:
What he was talking about is that rediffing patches, i.e. making patches apply to a new upstream version (that's what "rediffing" means for us Fedora packagers), is more likely to break for configure.ac than for configure.
And that's exactly what I said. Thank you for agreeing with me, that fixing configure is less likely to cause problems in the long run.
Which happens far less often than routine changes to configure.ac, as the package natural evolves over time. autoconf changes happens maybe once every other year or so. Most configure script change far more often than once every other year.I don't know what upstreams you worked with. For the projects I worked on with Romain Liévin, he generally ran autoreconf with what was current on Debian unstable or testing that day and me with what was current on Fedora (stable updates) that day. The stuff would even ping-pong between the Debian
Well, I don't know what those projects were, but here's a better known example. I just downloaded all available versions of the 2.4 branch of openldap, and greped their configure script. The results are:
openldap-2.4.6/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59. openldap-2.4.7/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59. openldap-2.4.8/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59. openldap-2.4.9/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59. openldap-2.4.10/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59. openldap-2.4.11/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59. openldap-2.4.12/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59. openldap-2.4.13/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59. openldap-2.4.14/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.61. openldap-2.4.15/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.61. openldap-2.4.16/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.61. Now, let's grep configure.in:openldap-2.4.6/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.7 2007/10/16 23:43:09 quanah Exp $ openldap-2.4.7/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.7 2007/10/16 23:43:09 quanah Exp $ openldap-2.4.8/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.9 2008/02/11 23:26:37 kurt Exp $ openldap-2.4.9/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.9 2008/02/11 23:26:37 kurt Exp $ openldap-2.4.10/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.9 2008/02/11 23:26:37 kurt Exp $ openldap-2.4.11/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.9 2008/02/11 23:26:37 kurt Exp $ openldap-2.4.12/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.14 2008/09/17 22:54:33 quanah Exp $ openldap-2.4.13/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.17 2008/11/21 01:26:24 quanah Exp $ openldap-2.4.14/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.22 2009/01/26 21:54:23 quanah Exp $ openldap-2.4.15/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.22 2009/01/26 21:54:23 quanah Exp $ openldap-2.4.16/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.22 2009/01/26 21:54:23 quanah Exp $
Over a span of nearly two years, openldap updated their autotools exactly once, while configure.in changed six times (with several additional intervening changes in-between consecutive releases).
Which busy project would you like to repeat this experiment with?
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