* Rasmus Bøg Hansen <moffe@zz9.dk>, 2011-09-20, 21:06:
Upstream did rip the autotools helper files from autotools but they are modified and the package does not really use autotools, so updating the helper files will just break his configure-script.Why did you override ancient-autotools-helper-file?
Will it? From what I can see, they are just old versions of the GNU scripts, but maybe I'm missing something. If upstream actually did modify them... well, that's crazy.
BTW, license and copyright holders of these files are not documented in debian/copyright.
Thus the warnings does not really make sense.
As far as I can see, the config.guess is not run at all in our case, and config.sub results are not used for anything utile. So while the override is indeed justified here, I'd rather learn these things from a comment in the override file, not from inspecting the source.
I don't understand what #641573 has to with multi-arch. It looks more like a problem with using --as-needed for linking, which is BTW (thankfully!) not the default in Debian.Neither do I. It seems to either affect only Ubuntu or affect Debian in special cases (perhaps when using multiarch, which I am not). I did implement the change as it seems to fix the bug in Ubuntu and certainly should not hurt.
One thing is implementing a change that doesn't hurt, another thing is misrepresenting reasons for it in the changelog.
Some other things:Please consider using a patch system. The current monolithic diff.gz makes it hard to understand what changes you made to upstream source and why.
debian/rules uses DEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE and DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE without defining them. While dpkg-buildpackage defines them for you, you should not rely it.
-- Jakub Wilk