Re: Increasing regularity of build systems

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

David Welton wrote:
> Xemacs21 - runs *autoconf* to generate other makefiles, which are then
> run.
> [...]
> 
> Do you seem what I mean?  Each of these is doing something slightly
> different, and it is a bit frustrating not to see a bit more
> cohesiveness.  Not that any of these things are *bad*, per se, just
> that there seem to be a lot of packages that do stuff like this.

Well, for this particular case (xemacs21), I think that running autoconf
in the debian/rules file is "bad per se", and should be discouraged at
least, if not forbidden by policy (I guess it is already forbidden by the
GNU standards).

Antti-Juhani wrote:
> I see broken debian/rules files that should be fixed.

I see the same.

I also see deficiencies in the packaging system (for example, packages
which apply different patches in the build process). This is a nice
feature of SRPMs which we might want to implement some day in the
standard tools.

Thanks.

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