[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#733193: Bug#733193: thunar: use dh-autoreconf for better new-port coverage

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 11:49:01PM +0100, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 10:30:49PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > The ppc64el port requires a patch to libtool.m4.  I don't think that's
> > in Debian yet, but when it is it will require autoreconfing a bunch of
> > packages to pick it up.  thunar could handle this quite easily by using
> > dh-autoreconf, which will update its copies of the libtool macros.
> 
> Unless we want to autoreconf each and every C package in Debian,

IMO every package using the autotools should autoreconf itself at build
time, yes.  I'm not the only one who thinks this;
/usr/share/doc/autotools-dev/README.Debian.gz has been strongly
recommending it for at least four years.  I fixed all my own packages
some time ago, as have a number of other developers.

Now, I know better than to advocate for it being a release-critical bug
or whatever until it's somewhat more widespread practice; but this is a
case that autoreconf-at-build-time would have avoided, so it's a good
excuse to introduce it to this package now to save problems next time.

> I think we'll wait until that port is actually introduced. Can you
> keep us updated in case we miss it?

This doesn't make sense to me, I'm afraid.  dh_autoreconf arranges to
run autoreconf at the start of the build, so there's no reason to wait
for the libtool patches in question to be applied in Debian before you
apply my patch.  It is of benefit even without those patches since it
means that anyone who needs to patch your package's build system can do
so simply by patching the true source files, without having to figure
out how to regenerate things appropriately as well.

The port itself was announced in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2013/09/msg00045.html.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]