[pkg-lighttpd] Bug#726394: lighttpd: config.guess/config.sub out of date for arm64

Colin Watson cjwatson at ubuntu.com
Tue Oct 15 11:31:46 UTC 2013


On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 01:17:59PM +0200, Stefan Bühler wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Oct 2013 11:44:56 +0100
> Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > lighttpd's config.guess/config.sub are out of date for the forthcoming
> > arm64 port.  The attached patch sets things up so that you don't have
> > to be bothered by this type of bug for future ports.
> > 
> > Ideally, you'd be able to use the more comprehensive dh-autoreconf
> > instead.  However, this currently fails because of the use of the
> > obsolete AM_C_PROTOTYPES macro in configure.ac.  It would be good to
> > fix this at some point.
> 
> We fixed some autotool stuff upstream, so you might want to give 1.4.33
> a try;

Thanks.  I don't maintain the package, though, so I'm not going to try a
new version - I'm doing mass porting work of lots and lots of packages
and don't have time to spend very long on each one.  Of course the
package maintainer is welcome to.

HOWEVER: Packages in Debian should not in general assume that
config.guess and config.sub are up to date in any given upstream
distribution.  As a general rule (and of course there are exceptions)
they should update config.guess and config.sub from the central versions
in our autotools-dev package at the start of each build.  This means
that we don't need to upload new source for every package in the
archive, even those written in generally portable C, every time somebody
comes up with a new architecture.  This makes the porting team's job
very much easier, and frees them up to work on the interesting problems
rather than lots of boring ones like this (I've filed 21 of these bugs
in just the last week).

So, even if your new upstream version includes aarch64 support in
config.{guess,sub}, that does not supersede this bug: the Debian
packaging should ensure that they're kept up to date anyway, so that we
don't have to stop and fix it again next time round.

> I'm not sure what --with=autotools_dev does exactly, but I'd like to
> point out that autoconf is often incompatible across versions

Not relevant; the autotools-dev debhelper add-on only updates
config.guess and config.sub, which are highly compatible across
versions.  As expected, the current version builds just fine on arm64
once config.guess and config.sub are brought up to date.

> You are welcome to help us improve the upstream release process; I
> think the autotools fail to update outdated helper scripts - you
> actually have to manually remove them.

  autoreconf --force --install

Regards,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]



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