On Sat, 24 Jan 2015 21:15:11 +0000 "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 07:42:20PM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > > On 01/24/2015 03:14 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > > > > > >I notice that Debian recently [since July 2014] started to > > >recommend that packagers run autoreconf on build. Their reasons > > >are given here and seem to be good ones: > > > > > >https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf > > > > > >In the interests of fairness I can think of two drawbacks too: > > > > > > - newer versions of (especially) automake have not always been > > > improvements, and some upstreams may wish to stick with older > > > ones > > > > > > - autoreconf is slow > > > > > >Debian have probably hit most of the bugs by now, and I think this > > >is a good recommendation that perhaps Fedora packagers should be > > >encouraged to follow too. What do you think? > > This is bad advice. > > > > Autoreconf only works if a package has been prepared for it and if a > > package is actively maintained. > > ... which would be a bug in the upstream package. But yes I agree > this is possibly controversial. On the other hand Debian likely will > have encountered these bugs before us. I have a number of packages that do this for .. reasons ... and every time rawhide uses a new automake some of them have issues :( So it is not an effort free recommendation, and should be done carefully. > > In many other cases autoreconf can cause subtile and hard to find > > issues. In complex cases, it doesn't work at all. > > Again, bugs in the upstream package. Which, you may not always be able to address timely, and osme times it makes no sense to, because the changer is a gratuitous one, in one of the autotools. Simo. -- Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
