On Wed, 2022-01-19 at 18:43 +0200, Thomas Koch wrote: > My package ships two convenience copies from autoconf-archive in it's > m4 folder. Should I In my experience with libpst, it had embedded copies of Python/boost macros from autoconf-archive that were modified and the modifications hadn't been sent back to autoconf-archive upstream and they changed the API of the macros in a way that was incompatible with the upstream API and caused FTBFS when using the autoconf-archive upstream macros because configure.ac used the modified API instead of the upstream API. My solution to this was to get a patch into libpst upstream switching to the autoconf-archive upstream API. That patch later got reverted, so that the package would build on CentOS 6 direct from the VCS. Later upstream orphaned libpst so I took over the project, removed the m4 files and promptly rediscovered, redebugged and refixed the issue. So my suggestion to you is to figure out which version of the macros from which autoconf-archive version you have, then figure out if they are modified, then discuss the situation with upstream to ensure they understand the situation and won't revert any patch, then send upstream a patch if they like the idea, then switch from the upstream tarballs to the upstream VCS for the Debian orig.tar.gz, so that prebuilt files (like ./configure) and embedded copies aren't present in the Debian orig.tar.gz and you can be certain that Debian can rebuild the build system accurately solely from Debian packages. Optionally it would be a good idea to compare the upstream tarball with the upstream VCS and account for any differences between the two. Personally I'd really like autotools tarball to be changed to create multiple tarballs instead of one. One with VCS contents, one with autotools embedded copies (config.guess, m4 macros etc), one with other embedded copies, one with autotools prebuilt files and one with other prebuilt files. Then users and distros could choose how many of the upstream tarballs to consume. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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