Re: A debian/rules target to rebuild pre-built stuff?
* Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> [111025 14:28]:
> On Tue, 25 Oct 2011, Adam Borowski wrote:
> > If they use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE and it's "disabled" [1], there's no way to
> > check if they aren't in DFSG and/or GPL violation by shipping sourceless
> > code. Forbidding it would at least deal with patching autotools output
> > rather than source.
>
> As a rule, you are supposed to get rid of all autogenerated files and
> rebuild them from scratch when packaging for Debian. AM_MAINTAINER_MODE
> changes nothing in that case, as you will readly notice any upstream
> breakage when you try to build the package after importing a new upstream
> release.
As another rule, you are not supposed to derivate much from upstream
without a reason. Using build scripts generated with a different version
is such a derivation.
So while you are supposed to redo them, you are also supposed to keep
them, and it depends on a lot of other factors what is the best thing to
do.
> Granted, there are exceptions to all rules, but autotools has not been one
> for more than a decade. In fact, we had a LOT of breakage over the years
> because maintainers built packages with whatever buggy autotooling upstream
> used, instead of retooling. libtool was the worst source of nastyness, but
> even the simple stuff like GNU config (config.sub/.guess) caused some
> trouble.
Libtool is quite a beast, much different to autoconf and automake.
Upstreams needing config.sub/.guess usually means there is some ugliness
hidden in there (most of the time that ugliness it called libtool,
though).
When using libtool I guess it makes sense to retool it, but I think
without libtool it depends how much changes you want to do to the
build system.
Bernhard R. Link
Reply to: