Re: Best practice for cleaning autotools-generated files?

[Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml@free.fr>]

On 16/03/2011 14:59, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Marcin Owsiany writes ("Best practice for cleaning autotools-generated files?"):
>> The current best practice for dealing with packages using GNU autotools
>> (as described in /usr/share/doc/autotools-dev/README.Debian.gz) is to
>> run autoreconf in a prerequisite of a build target, and to remove its
>> results in the clean target.
> 
> I think this is bad advice.  These files should be shipped in the
> source package.  
> 
> Doing that makes it much easier to build the package in unexpected
> environments (eg, backports, downstream distros).

Then, you need a way to patch them. There is lots of software where
you need to patch configure.ac and/or Makefile.am

If you do it with the patch system (quilt or even plain dpkg),
before building the package source, you cannot ensure that files are
patched in the right order.
So Makefile rules can then re-run auto* tools at build time and you
lost the benefit you want to have.

Workaround exists but are not very easy to setup.

  Regards,
    Vincent

> Ian.