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

[Wookey]

+++ Niels Thykier [2015-06-13 11:16 +0200]:
> 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?

Not really. Many packages are now using dh-autoreconf already. Others
have their autofoo updated regularly upstream or by maintainers. So
the only ones we notice are the ones that do not have this and are
stable or languishing.

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

Largely. dh-autoreconf is a superset of dh-autotools-dev, except in
the small number of cases where you need both :-(
(see https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf#dh-autoreconf_and_autotools-dev )

I'm not sure whether dh can reliably work out when to run
autotools-dev updates before runing dh-autoreconf. It would be nice to
solve this problem completely, rather than just mostly. 

It should be a matter of:
if B-D: (autoconf and not automake)
 dh_autotools-dev
if B-D: (autoanything)
 dh-autoreconf

but I've not tested this (are the package dependencies reliably
correct?)
 
> 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.

That's fair enough. I'll try to drum up some numbers to get a handle
on it.

Wookey
-- 
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http://wookware.org/