autoconf and epel-5

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Tue Feb 24 22:09:39 UTC 2009


Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 21:01 +0100, Simon Wesp wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> i have a little issue with autoconf and epel-5
>>
>> the statement of the problem:
>>
>> in configure.ac stands: 
>> CXXFLAGS="-Wall -O2"
>>
>> to honor the rpmoptflags i removed this line and create a patch of my
>> changes.
>>
>> now i have to run autoconf to implement my changes. no problem in
>> fedora. in epel-5 it will abort:
>> http://buildsys.fedoraproject.org/logs/fedora-5-epel/1476-hosts3d-0.97-3.el5/i386/build.log
> 
> The most authoritative thing I can find in the Wiki seems to frown on
> the practice of patching configure.ac in the first place:
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/AutoConf
> 
> "Autotools-generated source packages are intended to be buildable
> without requiring the autotools on the host system. autoconf, automake,
> libtoolize and the accompanying autoreconf shouldn't be used in the %
> prep or %build sections of a package's spec file. Applying a patch to
> update the configure scripts and Makefile.ins is preferred as the
> results are predictable and packages are more reproducible."
> 
> If this is not in fact the agreed policy, I'd expect the agreed policy
> to show up more prominently in a Wiki search for 'autoconf'. :)
> 
There's no agreed policy.  People argue both sides of the problem.
FWIW, I'll vote against that draft if it gets to the FPC.


> Aside from that, I'd say did you read, and try, the advice you were
> given in the failure log?
> 
> "You have another version of autoconf.  It may work, but is not
> guaranteed to.
> If you have problems, you may need to regenerate the build system entirely.
> To do so, use the procedure documented by the package, typically `autoreconf'."
> 
> i.e., see if it works with autoreconf. IMHO it is generally a good idea
> to use autoreconf rather than just autoconf anyway, because just using
> autoconf is more likely to fail if, say, we go up a major version of
> autoconf, and upstream source doesn't have a new release in that time.
> autoreconf has at least a better chance of succeeding in that situation
> (though it won't always).

In the most recent debate, someone said that autoreconf should never be
run.  Wish you had been there to lend another perspective :-)

-Toshio

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