[Pkg-openmpi-maintainers] [Fwd: Re: debian/patches/99autoconf]

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 27 June 2007 at 15:36, Manuel Prinz wrote:
| Am Dienstag, den 26.06.2007, 12:55 +0200 schrieb Sylvestre Ledru:
| > Le mardi 26 juin 2007 à 05:07 -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel a écrit :
| > > Yes, and conceptually there is no reason why the same could not be achieved
| > > by patching the underlying configure.ac directly.
| > I am not sure that we are even touching the configure.ac ...

Sylvestre, that is precisely my point:

 -rw-rw-r--   10254/11000     38636 openmpi-1.2.3/configure.ac

A patch to a 38 __kilobytes__ file would certainly end up smaller than 

-rw-r--r-- 1 edd edd 3.2M Jun 23 11:37 debian/patches/99autoconf.dpatch

3.2 __megabytes__.  Our diff.gz is ridiculously large.

| > If it is the case, do we have the patch for this file ?
| 
| After having a closer look at my modification, I did the 99* patch (TM)
| by applying patch 10opal* with dpatch-edit-patch, ran autoreconf and
| saved the differences as the 99* patch. 

Ok, now for the slow-witted folks in the corner like myself:
-- why, ie what does 10opal* do ? Was there a bug report on it?
-- why does it have to re-applied in a second patch ?

| I never touched configure.ac and

See above. Maybe you should should have. In a nutshell, configure.ac is like
source, configire itself is like a binary.  We should, if possible, modify
the former.  p But be aware that this is a somewhat theoerical
argument. There may be practical reasons I am missing...

| have no idea why only configure is affected since the file that was
| modified is opal/asm/Makefile.am. Maybe I'm lacking of autotools skills.
| 
| By looking at 99* I get the impression that most of the changes is due
| to reformatting or rewriting of functions created by autotools. The
| actual difference is (just guessing!) not that big at all. I can't say

<grin> So *WHAT* is the actual difference?    We have been circling this
question for a few days now...

| if there's anything we can do about it to shrink the patch in size.
| 
| Running autoconf during the build process would modify some files and
| I'm wondering if that would break some QA tests like rebuilding the same
| package twice, since debian/rules clean is expected to take back any
| modifications done to the sources. Can we keep track of that when we run
| autoconf at build time? That was the intension of the patch because one
| can easily deapply it.

I tried to answer this in a previous email via

    But let me just try to think out loud here:

    1)  debian/patches/99* modifies some .am/.ac files
    2)  before calling configuire, we call autoconf/automake as needed

    3)  we build as usual thanks to 1) and 2)

    4)  clean removes the generated configure script
    5)  dpatch unapplies the diffs from 1) and we're fine

    Now, all of that is of course hypothetical unless we get the set of changes
    to the .ac/.am files back. Do you still have them?  

So far nobody has said that this can't work so...

Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison