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

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 07:34:03AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 7:32 PM, Vincent Bernat wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I tend to think users and Debian contributors making updates to Debian
> stable not being able to patch and rebuild autotools based build
> systems is a serious issue. We should enable detection of this issue
> by enabling dh-autoreconf in as many packages as possible.
> 
> Building as much as possible from source at package build time should
> be the norm not the exception, otherwise the build process for that
> source will bitrot and we will never detect that.

Yes, I couldn't agree more.  Having "sources" for bits of your package's
build system that can't in fact be easily patched to change its
behaviour is a profoundly irritating bug that's been lying around in
Debian for far too long, and it's past time we made more of an effort to
fix it.  (I believe that I have put my money where my mouth is and fixed
all my packages in this way, including ones that were written against
distinctly elderly versions of the autotools.)

It is true that compatibility is sometimes less than ideal, but brushing
the problem under the carpet just means that somebody gets to discover
this when they're in a hurry trying to fix some unrelated problem years
later, when the change in the autotools has been largely forgotten
about, rather than it being fixed in a timely fashion.

But this is sort of off-topic for the original report, and I apologise
for derailing it ...

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]