Re: Ok to use upstream doumentation as-is (i.e. not regenerate)?
"Bernhard R. Link" <brlink@debian.org> writes:
> * Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org> [110604 14:22]:
>> It's better to build the pre-generated files from source in case you
>> need to modify the source. It's easier to just modify for example
>> configure.ac instead of modifying it and figuring out how to rebuild
>> the pre-generated files, especially when you do security fixes or
>> stable release updates.
> Changing configure.ac does not really sound like a very minimal
> change to me.
It often is, though. For example, I've modified several configure.ac
files to just add a pattern for GNU Hurd to the pattern for Linux that
controls some behavior that also works on the Hurd. It's about a seven
character change.
I still use the upstream's generated files most of the time because it's
less complex. But I'm increasingly liking the idea of packaging an
upstream release tag from a Git repository instead, at which point it's
nice and clean to run the autotools during the build. The only thing that
I still don't like about that is that it means the Debian packaging is
based on a generated tarball that doesn't have any direct relationship
with the tarball that upstream distributes.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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