On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 06:22:43PM +0200, Thomas Viehmann wrote: > Sorry, but I have to point out that your recommendation describes the > very opposite of Debian best packaging practices. > > - Basically, the only reason to repackage upstream is to avoid license > problems. Dropping unneccessary stuff might be OK if hundreds of > megabytes can be saved, but is generally not OK. Agreed. > - Specifically, if you need to update autotool output, this belongs 100% > in the diff.gz (directly or via dpatch et al). Agreed. > It is frowned upon (for good reasons by the qa people) to regenerate > at runtime [1]. I don't agree with the frowning, and I'm not sure if the referenced slide proves your point: > drawbacks: > - Often creates a huge diff > - You will need to take care of timestamps > - Bugs in the autotools are not automatically fixed In particular the last point is something Which I think is important. And what I would also consider a drawback: - It doesn't allow the user to make changes to all source files and have them compiled. Make will try to rerun automake when the Makefile.am changed (I think), but it may not work. > drawbacks of running the autotools during the build: > - Does not require insane build-depends I don't see any problem at all in this. We have Debian, which is full of great software. Why should we be afraid to use it? And really, autotools are not an "insane build depend". Anyone changing and building packages will have them installed anyway. > - You know exactly what is in the autotools files whatever the build > environment Well yes, but at the cost of autotools bugs not being fixed. In general, I would think that if the autotools are going to generate different output, then it's probably because of bugs being fixed. Nothing wrong with using that. However, it does make sense to Build-Depends: on and explicitly call a specific version of aclocal/automake, because different versions of that can have quite different output (or fail to parse input). > Also note that deletion of files is ignored for diff.gz creation. Right, I do delete all generated files (including config.sub, configure, Makefile.in) in the clean target for that reason. > 1. http://sam.zoy.org/lectures/20050910-debian/img17.html Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://129.125.47.90/e-mail.html
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