Re: RFS: trophy (Adopted and updated package)

[Gergely Nagy <algernon@balabit.hu>]

Kilian Krause <kilian@debian.org> writes:
> 1. Using dh-autoreconf is ugly. Please try to avoid it and backport the
> full regenerated configure in your patch to make sure the source is
> identical on all buildds. IMHO dh-autoreconf is a solution for a local
> build that you maintain for yourself outside of Debian, but not for an
> official pacakge.

I strongly disagree with this view. While dh-autoreconf may not be the
best solution in all cases, it does have its uses (apart from the
obvious case where the upstream tarball does not have generated files
like configure & co).

For example, running dh-autoreconf instead of including the regenerated
configure and whatnot in the debian.tar.gz has the following advantages:

* It's much much smaller.
* It makes it easy to keep the generated files up to date. Which can
  easily benefit the buildds.
* If autoreconf breaks the package build, no big deal: it probably
  needed an update anyway, if for nothing else, then to allow
  transitioning the old version of auto* out of Debian, so we won't have
  5 or more versions of, say, automake in the distribution.

The only downside from my point of view, is that it pulls in quite a bit
of stuff, which places some extra burden on the buildds.

Of course, if a package's build system has a tendency to break randomly
when autoreconf'd, then regenerating configure & co with a known good
version is advisable. But for most cases, where both configure and the
Makefile.ams are dead simple, I see little harm, and that's far
outweighted by having a small and clean .debian.tar.gz.

I believe that touching as little as possible in the upstream sources is
desirable, that the debian patches remain unobtrusive and reasonably
compact. Regenerating configure & co goes against this, as it touches
not only the sources, but generated files aswell.

-- 
|8]