[Fedora-packaging] Modifying upstream tarballs

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2007-06-05 at 12:40 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> Ville Skyttä wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I'm uncomfortable with that, and prefer the consistency/reproducibility 
> of running autotools at buildtime, but that's just me.
This approach is the guaranteed way to ruin, because

1. The autotools are not supposed to be run at built time.

2. Many older package configurations do not work with recent autotools
and break in often subtile ways if you run newer autotools on them.

3. There is nothing reliable in running the autotools at buildtime.

Finally, it's not hard not add magic to configurations in such a way
they don't re-run the autotools.

Ralf