Re: How thorough must the clean target be?
Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>> It's kind of neat, but I'm not sure it's really any better than just
>> replacing config.{guess,sub} at build time and it's functionally
>> equivalent. Either way you have to build-depend on autotools-dev, so
>> it's a question of preference of one more patch versus two lines in
>> debian/rules.
> Note that these two lines in debian/rules create a quite big patch...
The whole point of doing it in debian/rules is that it *doesn't* create a
big patch, at least the way that I do it (which is in the build target
before running configure).
I really don't like the practice of doing this in the clean target. That
behaves very badly for the way that I maintain Debian packages, since it
means I'd be regularly releasing something different from what's checked
into the VCS. Doing it optionally depending on the existence of a file
adds non-deterministic build behavior as a bonus.
I can understand the feeling of the people who like to just take care of
all the Autotools stuff and leave a big patch, but it's a *really* big
patch and I like to be able to read through the Debian patch using
filterdiff -x '*/debian/*' and make sure I understand everything that's
changed (or, for most of my packages, make sure that there's nothing left,
since I use quilt). I'd rather notice and fix build problems related to
newer versions of the Autotools.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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