On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 13:31 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > To add to that: I never recall a single instance where I couldn't fix any
> > breakage in someone else's canned configure/makefile scripts without having
> > to rerun autoconf and automake.
>
> > If there was a problem in the configure script, rather than patching
> > configure.ac or configure.in, I simply patched the configure script itself.
>
> Yeah, and the question is why that's a good idea at all, let alone so
> superior as to be policy. To me it sounds exactly like arguing that you
> should fix a code bug by patching the emitted assembler code, instead of
> touching the C code. Or fixing a grammar problem by patching bison's
> output file instead of the input .y file. It just seems uselessly stone
> age. And it certainly does not yield a patch that you are going to be
> able to submit to upstream.
Here's my 2 cents: I just change things in Makefile.am, configure.ac,
etc. -- making changes upstreamable -- then run autoreconf and generate
a patch that brings the original configure, Makefile.in, etc. files to
the state I got after running autoreconf -- which makes builds (better)
repeatable.
I'd really love to be able to re-run current auto-tools on old
Makefile.am/configure.{in,ac} files and the results to work in all
cases, but right now that seems utopian to me.
Nils
--
Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase
Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty
nils@xxxxxxxxxx nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759
PGP fingerprint: C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F 656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011
--
devel mailing list
devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
