Till Maas <opensource <at> till.name> writes:
> Afaik, it is best practices to create a patch for upstream agains
> configure.ac, then run autoreconf etc. locally and then create a diff between
> the upstream tarball and the new contents and use this in the spec file,
> which would be a patch agains configure. Then you do not need to run
> autoreconf in rpmbuild.
But unless you manage to find the exact same versions of the autotools upstream
used (which are in general not packaged for Fedora at all), the patch will be
huge and contain lots of bogus changes due to the autotools version change. For
example, autoconf often adds support for some exotic target or a workaround for
some obscure shell's bug from one minor version to the next and that support
code or workaround gets copied up to dozens of times into the generated
configure script. Also things like copyright dates and revision numbers appear
at many places. So a diff for the generated files can be huge even with _no_
change to the sources, and the actual change will be hidden in the mess.
Patches of that kind also have to be regenerated at every single new upstream
version.
In most cases, patching generated files is a bad idea.
Kevin Kofler
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