Re: Generated files and patch systems
On Sun, 25 May 2008, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 01:07:56PM +0100, Neil Williams wrote:
>
> > So I am running the relevant autotools at build time but I still get the
> > warning.
>
> If you run autotools at build time you should also ensure that the
> changes which autotools makes are reverted in the clean target. This
> means that your diff doesn't get cluttered with automatically generated
> things and ensures that repeated builds of the package produce the same
> diff.gz.
Exactly, it's the reason why I filed
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=482716 in the first
place.
Removing the files which are regenerated in the configure stage is a
simple way to make sure that that you don't end up with such clutter.
Several of the packages which contain such useless changes in the diff
end up causing problems once you try to convert them to source format 3.0
(quilt) because the changes can't be applied/unapplied at any point of
time if the files are regenerated by some intermediate step.
Some examples:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=482749
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=482733
So I'm in favor of keeping this lintian warning because if the maintainer
makes the effort to keep clean patches, it should also make the effort to
make sure that the package cleans up nicely and doesn't clutter the
.diff.gz.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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