[debhelper-devel] Bug#480576: Bug#480576: debhelper and dh-autoreconf

[Niels Thykier]

On 2015-06-12 18:57, Wookey wrote:
> I would second the opinion that running dh-autoreconf by default is
> something that should be expected to work. In practice it does work
> except for old and languishing packages that have very old autofoo:
> those need some updates. Often very simple ones, but in a few cases
> deeper ones. See (https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf for useful info)
> 

Do we have a rough estimate on the number of affected packages?

> So I would like to clarify whether there is a plan to do this in debhelper
> for level 10 or not, as mooted in this bug
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=744915#25
> 

To my knowledge: No, there is no plan currently.  Please note that I am
personally generally open to the idea.

> Maintainers (at least one) seem to be expecting it:
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=788321#20
> but perhaps that is premature?
> 

Yes, that might be a bit premature.

> Is the situation 'yes, if someone sends patches', or 'yes, it's
> underway', or 'maybe, sometime', or 'no never, it's a dumb idea' (or
> something else)?
> 
> cheers
> 
> Wookey
> 

Unclear, though I suspect that implementing this would make #733045
obsolete?

I suspect this would be less controversial/easier to reason about if we
got a number on of the packages, where autoreconf would reject the input
files.  This would at least help me figure out how many maintainers
would be affected by this change on their next compat bump.

~Niels