Re: Bug#397939: Lintian: outdated-autotools-helper-file
On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 08:24:43PM +0100, Loïc Minier wrote:
> Yes, I second Russ here and would like to add that it's very easy to
> trigger the timestamp skews if you simply create a patch for
> configure + configure.in/.ac as the files will be sorted as configure
> first and then configure.in/.ac so that applying the patch causes
> configure.in/.ac to be newer than configure...
This isn't true if you just let the patch be applied by dpkg-source -x,
since the timestamp-handling bug I mentioned earlier was fixed. It might
be true if you use a less capable patching system. ;-)
> Also, automake/autoconf/aclocal might be triggerred while e.g. some m4
> macros aren't installed on the buildd or the developer's system. Of
> course these are usually shipped with the upstream tarballs, but are
> often missing/incomplete.
If that is the case then the end user is going to lose out anyway when
trying to modify the package. I'm not arguing that such bugs shouldn't
be fixed, merely that it's a mistake to turn them into showstoppers that
could potentially block more urgent upload requirements.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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