Please add autoconf and automake to the buildroot

[Steve Dickson]

Paul Howarth wrote:
> 
> 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.
point... and not having the correct buildreqs in the spec file
would be a bug in the spec file... and the person should report
it as such... but that is not a reason to leave a corruption hole
in our build process that can potentially destroy a system with
a corrupt rpm... imho...

> 
> 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.
Patching the autotool generated files is not a good idea imho...
You basically saying don't use *any* of the autoconf tools and just
hack things to work... I've been down that path and I have found
those hack become very unmaintainable in a very short time...
It it much much easy to simple patch the autoconf files and
rerun the tools..

steved.