Re: autotools during build

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

"W. Borgert" <debacle@debian.org> writes:

> On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 10:55:44AM +0200, Andreas Fester wrote:
>> I agree with Martin that autoconf and automake should not be run from
>> rules, and that upstream should provide a configure script.
>> ./configure; make; make install is what I expect to do as a user of
>> a (original upstream) package, and IMHO the need to run autoconf makes the
>
> In most cases this is correct, but don't forget that ./configure
> is not a source file ("the preferred form of the work for making
> modifications to it").  If you never try to re-build these files
> you can easily have a FTBFS situation without knowing it.

On the other hand, if you run them during build then you MUST 'unrun'
them in the clean target. Otherwise every build will get a (potentialy
hugely) different diff.gz file.

I'm sure the majority of packages that do run auto* mess this up and
you get huge diff files as a consequence when you rebuild the
package. Getting a 20k line interdiff for a 'one line patch, debuild,
debdiff' run is not uncommon.

MfG
        Goswin