Re: Bug#397939: Lintian: outdated-autotools-helper-file
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:
> Rather than incurring the pain of gratuitous full regeneration every
> time, we just regenerate it when the user has changed something. Yes,
> the user now gets to resolve any problems that might have been
> pre-existing, but realistically either the Debian maintainer or the
> upstream maintainer is probably going to run into those at some point
> anyway.
>
> I think we should recommend (but not require) that AM_MAINTAINER_MODE
> not be used, and perhaps work to specify an optional debian/rules target
> that regenerates the build system in an appropriate way. That seems to
> provide the necessary benefits for users who need to change these files
> without imposing an unacceptable burden on developers. I don't think
> there's a good cause to go much further than that at this point.
I think this would in some respects be the worst of both worlds. The
problem with not using AM_MAINTAINER_MODE is that the autotools *may* be
run but generally aren't. This means that build dependencies only needed
when one modifies those files aren't present or aren't tested. Modifying
one of those files can suddenly spark the discovery that upstream isn't
compatible with the current autotools, the partial run of Automake can
leave the whole tree in a broken state, and so forth.
But I suppose that's basically the normal argument for AM_MAINTAINER_MODE.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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