[debhelper-devel] Bug#733045: debhelper: Can debhelper make autotools-dev updating default behaviour?

Vincent Bernat bernat at debian.org
Wed Dec 25 11:32:48 UTC 2013


 ❦ 24 décembre 2013 18:33 CET, Colin Watson <cjwatson at debian.org> :

> Mostly the patches I've sent for these things have either been ignored
> until NMUed, or applied without complaint, but I've found that I've
> ended up in arguments with a small number of maintainers who have (IMO)
> irrational objections to updating config.guess/sub automatically,
> generally based on either confusing it with autoreconf and incorrectly
> believing that it has similar levels of breakage, or hanging onto a
> more-than-15-year-old grudge about GNU config triplet changes in the
> dawn of time.  I'd be happy to take this to the TC if necessary, but
> it's relatively minor and I figure we have enough to do. :-)
[...]

I don't remember you advocating for automatically update
config.guess/sub. However, I remember you for advocating automatic
autoreconf. Having both positions make it easier for people (like me) to
be confused about them.

> Yes, although note that the upcoming ppc64el port will require a full
> autoreconf for anything that uses libtool, because it requires a libtool
> patch that hasn't yet been part of a stable libtool release and is
> generally very poorly deployed in the generated autotools files shipped
> in upstream packages.  I've been sending rather a lot of patches to
> convert things to dh-autoreconf over the last couple of weeks.  It is,
> IMO, clearly the better path (both for long-term porting needs and in
> the ethical sense that it makes it easier for users to change the true
> source code for the build system), but it does require a bit more
> knowledge and effort from maintainers.

I have no problem with automatically updating config.guess/sub but I
have one with automatic autoreconf: as automake doesn't seem to care
about forward or backward-compatibility, using autoreconf will lead to
additional work for the maintainer: backporting may be harder because
automake is too old, FTBFS may happen from time to time because automake
introduced an incompatible change, etc.

If we get automatic config.guess/sub handling by dh, maybe we could just
libtool-generated files as well?
-- 
Make sure all variables are initialised before use.
            - The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plauger)
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