Please add autoconf and automake to the buildroot

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 15:36 -0400, Steve Dickson wrote:
> 
> 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...

What are the chances of this bug being found by someone other than the
packager? Very slim I'd have thought, particularly if the packager's
build system hides the bug from him.

> > 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..

Indeed it is. So re-run the tools yourself and use the tools' output to
make the patch.

Paul.