Re: Editing the sources in "debian/rules clean"

[Reinhard Tartler <siretart@debian.org>]

Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> writes:

> [Florian Weimer]
>> It has come to my attention that a number of packages edit source files
>> (i.e. non-generated files in the source directory tree) in the "clean"
>> target of debian/rules.
>
> Do you have any example packages to mention?  I've seen some updating
> of the config.* files in the clean target, and this seem to be fairly
> safe. 

Consider the case that you create a patch for a package in unstable on a
stable system. The autotools-dev package on stable is definitely older
than in unstable, so you always downgrade your version of config.*.
This seems to be a rather typical usecase when preparing security
updates.

I can only suggest to make this check conditional, like in the following
make snippet:

ifneq (,$(wildcard /usr/share/misc/config.guess))
config.guess:
	@echo updateing config.guess
	cp -f /usr/share/misc/config.guess config.guess
endif

ifneq (,$(wildcard /usr/share/misc/config.sub))
config.sub: /usr/share/misc/config.sub
	@echo updateing config.sub and config.guess
	cp -f /usr/share/misc/config.sub config.sub
endif


But even with that, I don't think that you can rely on the timestamps
being okay for using it safely in the clean target. 

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4