Re: Request for NMU

[Colin Walters <walters@debian.org>]

Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> writes:

> I didn't read the whole thread. There were many suggestions, but
> when talking about short term solutions you have to admit that the
> Build-Conflicts solution to this problem is:
>
> 1. working
> 2. easy
> 3. perfectly legal (since automake is neither essential nor
>                     build-essential)
>
>
> It's truely not the most elegant solution but it's working.

I agree it works in the short term.  In fact, it works the most
reliably out of all the short term solutions.  But it is the worst
solution in the long term, because it has the potential to break a lot
of packages the second a new automake hits unstable.

Also, there is the same problem with autoconf, and although it is less
severe because upstream maintainers tend to have less broken stuff in
their configure.in files, it is still a problem.

My original goal with that thread was to come up with a rough
consensus on the One True Solution; I guess that goal hasn't quite
been met yet.

> BTW (and without reading the whole thread about automake): If dpkg
> was able to preserve the timestamps of changed files no other action
> like convincing upstream or changes to debian/rules were needed in
> most cases...

Yes, this would be nice.