Hijacking this thread originally about https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Autoconf_271 What is the current thinking in Fedora about always running "autoreconf -i" during builds that use autotools? In Debian it's been recommended for a long time: https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf I maintain a few packages where I attempt to toggle autoreconfing based on whether patches touch build files. If a downstream patch is applied which touches any of configure.ac, Makefile.am, or several other files, then the build will attempt to run autoconf/automake and usually fail. These packages have: # If there are patches which touch autotools files, set this to 1. %global patches_touch_autotools %{nil} %if 0%{patches_touch_autotools} BuildRequires: autoconf, automake, libtool %endif %prep ... %if 0%{patches_touch_autotools} autoreconf -i %endif This is a kind of optimal solution, but also hard to get right - I often find myself forgetting to set the %global correctly after applying or removing downstream patches. The cons of always autoreconfing are that it slows down builds, sometimes considerably. It also could fail - I noticed that autoconf 2.71 has several incompatibilities with the most widely used autoconf (2.69). Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/ _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure