[Fedora-packaging] Modifying upstream tarballs

[Ville Skyttä]

On Tuesday 05 June 2007, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> >>>>> "VS" == Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta at iki.fi> writes:
>
> VS> There are cases where further modifications are useful, eg. in
> VS> order to eliminate build dependencies.
>
> I'm having trouble figuring out a case where you'd need to do this.
> The only thing I can come up with is that the upstream source is
> archived in a format other than zip or tar and you want to avoid a
> build-time dependency on the archiver.

Let's say for example one modifies the upstream tarball to prune things not 
allowed in Fedora, and while doing so, touch some files which require 
re-running autotools.

It's sometimes pretty hard to convince autotools not to run during the build 
after patching/touching something, and the upstream thing might need a 
version of autotools that is not available in all target distro versions, so 
that's not an easy way out either.

I think running autotools locally before re-rolling the modified tarball 
instead of doing the absolute minimum changes would be ok in this case, as 
long as things are scripted/documented.