autoreconf vs patching (Was Re: New package for review: gnome-cpufreq-applet)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 16:49:36 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> Am Sonntag, den 13.02.2005, 09:15 -0500 schrieb Toshio:
> > On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 12:28 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > > Adrian, cause there might be problems due to different autotools-
> > > versions we normally (at least AFAIK) solve this not by a autoreconfig
> > > in the spec file. We instead create a patch after running autoreconf -i
> > > -f against an unmodified src-tree and but the patch in the spec file.
> > > See sirius/sirius.spec for an example. Remember to remove the autoreconf
> > > cache-dir autom4te.cache/ before diffing.
> [...]
> > Thorsten -- what exactly are you thinking of in terms of version
> > mismatch?  
> 
> Well, I have no strong option here. I only do it that way after a
> discussion on IRC where someone said: 
> 
> "if you find a need to update files, you should create patches for them,
> and apply them in the spec file, instead of assuming whatever version of
> autoconf, automake, libtool and any other macro-providing package is
> going to do the right thing at any later point in time"
> 
> and I and some others agreed on that. 

If it works for you...


The important thing is to make sure that the upstream developers update
their autotools files soon, so you don't need to recreate the patches for
every minor version upgrade.