[Build-common-hackers] Bug#744915: cdbs updating of config.{sub, guess} is not automatic on buildds

[Wookey]

Package: cdbs
Version: 0.4.122
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

CDBS provides functionality to automatically update config.sub and
config.guess for autotools-using packages during the build. This is
good practice and there is growing consensus that this should be
automatic for Debian packages (although it is not yet policy).

However this update only occurs if autotools-dev package is installed
so that current versions are available in the debian canonical
location.

autotools-dev is only 'Recommended' by cdbs so on buildds it is not
installed during a build, so CDBS-using packages fail to build on new
architectures if their autoconf files are out of date (and very many are).

This could be fixed in two ways. 

1) Make every CDBS-and-autoconf- using package build-dep on autotools-dev, or 

2) make cdbs depend on autotools-dev.

It seems to me that packages that use CDBS are doing so party because
they expect it to take care of this sort of thing. And it does when
they test on their local system, where apt will install 'recommends'
by default. But it will (quite subtly) fail to take care of this on
buildds (or in local sbuild chroots but they won't notice because
thier chroots are very unlikely to be for the affected new
architectures so builds will still work) because those are set to not
install recommends by default.

I think the right fix for this is simply to make autotools-dev a
proper dependency of CDBS, and not a recommends. Is there any real
reason not to take this step?

Doing this means that all autotools and CDBS-using packages will
generally 'just work' on new architectures if they are capable of
doiing so.

Trivial patch attached.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.4
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (990, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-kvm-i386-20110111 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

cdbs depends on no packages.

Versions of packages cdbs recommends:
ii  autotools-dev  20120608.1

Versions of packages cdbs suggests:
ii  devscripts  2.12.6+deb7u2

-- no debconf information
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