Re: About a mass bug report not based on Sid or Jessie.
* Russ Allbery:
> It's an interesting question whether we should just force
> dh-autoreconf in debhelper unless the package maintainer explicitly
> turns it off. It would save me work, just as I've now been able to
> take overrides back out of all of my packages now that dpkg defaults
> to xz compression. But it would be disruptive, and some packages
> would definitely fail to build afterwards.
The correct long-term fix is to change autotools to check a list of
well-known paths for more recent versions of the scripts and use them
instead of what is provided in the package. The current autotools
setup implicitly assumes that most users run on a hostile system where
GNU tools are available under /usr/local at best, but thankfully, the
world has moved on (mostly).
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