Please add autoconf and automake to the buildroot

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 14:01 -0400, Steve Dickson wrote:
> Recently when trying to get out an rpm, a patch to a Makefile.am was not
> being applied because automake was not installed. The unapplied patch
> had to do with a version problem in which other rpms were depended on.
> Now the only way to tell that the rpm was corrupted was to
> install it and have a number of other rpms break....
> 
> Now the reason the patch was not applied was because the upstream
> configuration script *did not* fail when automake was not found,
> instead it used an already existing Makefile which caused the
> corruption. The truly scary part of this, was there was
> not one failure or warning or any type of signal that rpm
> was corrupted... This is not good...
> 
> Yes... adding a build requirement did indeed fix the problem, but
> thats not point... The point is by not installing some of the most
> used package configuration tools (i.e. autoconf and automake),
> the build process has a huge whole in which silent failures
> of configuration patches can cause *undetectable* corrupted rpms
> that will land on our user's systems.
> 
> Now I understand keeping the size of the build roots is important
> especially since they are now dynamic... but again... autoconf and
> automake are two most common build tools there are and not having
> them creates a hole that will continue plague us, especially
> with new packages...
> 
> So please adding these very small but highly used packages to close
> the rpm corruption hole in the build process....

On the other hand, by including autotools in the minimal buildroot,
people get away with not adding them as buildreqs of packages that need
them, which would then have the result that people trying to rebuild
these packages for themselves on systems without autotools installed
would come across these tricky problems, and probably be less able to
figure out what the problem is.

So my vote would be keep the status quo; packagers patching autotools
input files should either buildreq autotools, or, better still, also
patch the autotools generated files so that the autotools aren't needed
for the package build.

Paul.