autoconf/automake in BuildRequires

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 15:22 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 15:31 +0300, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> > According to wiki/PackagingGuidelines, there is exceptions list for 
> > BuildRequires tag:
> > 
> > > There is no need to include the following packages or their 
> > > dependencies as BuildRequires because they would occur too often. 
> > > These packages are considered the minimum build environment.
> > >
> > Autoconf and automake are not present in this list, therefore they must 
> > be specified in the BuildRequires tag. OTOH it looks as some basic 
> > tools... May be autoconf and automake should be included in the 
> > exception list too?
> Never.
> 
> Any package requiring them is _broken_. Such bugs should be reported
> upstream and fixed there.
> 
I agree that they should be reported upstream.  But what happens until
upstream makes their next release?  No movement on the package?  Or
truly horrid, unreviewable, thousand-line patches of Makefile.in's?
Whether running autoconf or patching Makefile.in's is more broken is not
clear.

> Also running any autotool as part of building a package imposes
> non-negligible risks to silently break packages.
> 
Can this be fixed by pegging which version of automake is needed?
$ head -1 ./Makefile.in
# Makefile.in generated by automake 1.7.9 from Makefile.am.
edit the spec to include
  BuildRequires: automake17

I don't know what problems you are referring to so I'm just taking a
stab in the dark at a possible solution.
-Toshio
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