Furthermore, we want to build the package from real source, which means
regenerating configure and Makefile.in (where applicable). For this, we
use the following commands:
export AUTOMAKE=automake-1.10
export ACLOCAL=aclocal-1.10
autoreconf --force --install --symlink
This gives some warnings (which I ignore, although you may want to fix
the ones in your code) and the following errors:
<---- snip errors ---->
(although autoheader calls them warnings, they do prevent it from
producing output).
You have to run configure and then make, as described in sdccman, chapter
2.4.1 Building SDCC on Linux.
Yes, I know that works, but we want to regenerate configure as well.
Debian is committed to providing free software to its users. To the
users, that means (among other things) they can change the software they
get. To make any use of this ability, they need to be able to build the
changed version. Debian (source) packages contain build rules which do
that. When they make changes, they can simply run the build scripts to
generate a new package which contains their changes. Nothing new so far
I suppose. :-)
However, there is a problem if we just run configure instead of
regenerating it. If the user makes changes to configure.in, for
example, then those changes aren't used if configure isn't regenerated.
Given that we currently aren't able to regenerate it, I don't think we
can expect users to figure out for themselves how to do it.
I hope that explains the question.