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Re: Best practice for cleaning autotools-generated files?



On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 3:15 PM, Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> wrote:

> Would you consider the existence of autotools autogenerated files inside
> an upstream source a valid reason to rebuild upstream source in a
> get-orig-source target?

I would consider autotools generated files (Makefile.in, configure,
etc) in an orig.tar.gz to be normal for an upstream project with a
build system based on autotools. Indeed, if such projects had a
tarball without those things I would consider it abnormal. I usually
wouldn't consider rebuilding a tarball to remove such files.

> More generally: Would you consider it a valid reason for rebuilding
> upstream source if upstream forgot to `make (dist)clean`?

Not sure what you are asking here. If upstream didn't use `make dist`
or `make distcheck` and that caused a problem I would contact upstream
and educate them about how to generate tarballs from autotools-based
projects.

> In several cases the answer "yes" to both questions would have saved me
> a certain amount of time because I cared about "purists complaining that
> debian/rules clean does not restore whatever crap was there upstream".

I don't think `debian/rules clean` was ever supposed to restore stuff
in orig.tar.gz, as long as debian/rules build regenerates it. So I
wouldn't bother caring about such folks.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise


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