On Sun, 22 Jul 2001, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > On Sat, Jul 21, 2001 at 06:58:06PM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > > The "it is not wise to do such things automatically" topic has been brought > > up and beaten back, btw. Please use the search facility in lists.debian.org > > if you're curious. > > How bold. I am one of those against doing these things automatically, Heh. I feel bold right now. Might be this VT's fonts fault, though. > feasible to do it that way, we could just do it externally to the package, > in the autobuilders for example. This would save almost everyone Well, the problem of doing that automatically *in the autobuilders* is that config.sub/guess files can be in strange places, or they might not be the GNU config stuff at all. I'd be wary of doing THAT much intrusive automatic updating. On the other hand, a human is perfectly able to add the proper stuff for automatic updating in that particular package, which is what autotools-dev suggests. > the effort. The reason not to do it either way are basically the same. I suppose so. It ends up being more a matter of personal taste than anything else. If you don't do it automatically, you either track GNU config changes on your own, or you will cause breakage in new archs sooner or later. If you do it automatically, GNU config upstream might screw up, I might not notice it in time and let it leak to autotools-dev, and cause breakage in your package. > It also completely removes the benefit of the builder not needing the build > dependency on the relevant packages. For this benefit, the upstream authors > of these tools go along way in compatible shell programming. I didn't really understand the above paragraph. Could you rephrase it, please? > If either point has been "beaten back", I'd like to see a more specific > pointer than lists.debian.org. Well, some complained that upstream changes (to GNU config) could break semantics: beaten back becuse GNU config interface is frozen in always-backward-compatible by design. Others complained the build system would be different from the autobuilders' system: duh. If it were not different, you would not need GNU config; A package will build differently in an BE machine and a LE machine even if they have the same config.guess/sub files. Others complained that brokeness in autotools-dev could cause silent breakage. Well, it can. But it is no worse than any other bug in gcc or libtool, or binutils. And I am *really* careful when I upload a new autotools-dev: I *always* go over all upstream changes line-per-line -- if one is going to upgrade GNU config, either automatically or manually, one might as well take advantage of that and use whatever is in autotools-dev ;) -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh
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