autoconf and epel-5

[Horst H. von Brand]

Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:

[...]

> Correct - I didn't mean to offend Tom, but it's obvious, that some
> people around in this thread don't understand the autotools.
> 
> If people were understanding them, they would not run the autotools
> inside of rpm.specs but would apply patches.

Please enlighten us.

AFAIU, the objective of autotools is to detect the environment's quirks
and configure the package accordingly. They were designed to take a set
of input files, and creating the configuration (and Makefile) for the
package on the fly.

In view of the above, it does make sense to run them when installing.
That is their whole point.

If there are reasons to bypass them, they aren't doing their job; which
is a bug that should be fixed.

As Fedora is (mostly) made up of new(ish) packages, so there should be
few problems with version skew.

So I (as an ousider here, I have used auto* quite a bit on a variety of
Unixy systems, but haven't written a line for it) am at a total loss
with your comments.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
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