Suggested packaging guideline: avoid running autoreconf

Braden McDaniel braden at endoframe.com
Mon Oct 13 03:20:04 UTC 2008


On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 19:10 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Braden McDaniel wrote:
> > On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 18:08 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote: 
> 
> >>> If a packager wants to include changes to the build script sources in
> >>> the source RPM, I have absolutely no objection to that.  But applying
> >>> those changes as part of the build wins nothing and invites breakage.
> >> Why should we jump through hoops to patch generated files and regularly update 
> >> the patches because they'll invariably break if we can just run autoreconf? It 
> >> is our (the individual package maintainers') problem to fix things if an 
> >> autotools update breaks them anyway!
> > 
> > Because it affects more than just you.  We won't have libtool2 in Fedora
> > 10 because people do what you're advocating.  That means there are
> > upstream developers who will be waiting that much longer for it and not
> > taking care of problems upstream on their own.
> > 
> Uhm... no.  We won't have libtool-2.2 in Fedora 10 because it's a big
> change and it's past beta.

Well, yeah, *now*.  libtool 2.2 is not particularly new.  This one's
been hanging out there for some time.

Had this been the low-collateral-damage sort of upgrade that it ought to
have been, it seems pretty likely that it would have gone in.  That, at
least, is what the comments in bug 435737 lead me to believe.

> If Fedora is to be relevant to developers as well as users we need to be
> conscious of the fact that even developer tools shouldn't change in a
> major, backwards incompatible way at the end of a release.

I'm not suggesting otherwise.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <braden at endoframe.com>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <braden at jabber.org>





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