This one time, at band camp, Russ Allbery said:
> Stephen Gran <sgran@debian.org> writes:
> > This one time, at band camp, Russ Allbery said:
>
> >> As previously discussed, it's very difficult to comply with this
> >> directive as written if one is following the autotools-dev
> >> recommendations for how to regenerate the various autotools files.
> >> Before putting too much weight on this directive, I'd really like to
> >> find some way of reconciling that, since right now it's a
> >> frequently-violated dictate of Policy.
>
> > That's probably a bug in the autotools-dev recommendation, rather than a
> > problem with policy, though. For handling config.{sub,guess}, the
> > freeradius package has a reasonable method for cleaning up after itself.
> > For rerunning autotools at build time, well, I tend to think that's a
> > mistake, but we've had that fight before and I'm not really interested
> > in reopening it.
>
> Well, by contending that this is a bug in the autotools-dev
> recommendation, you're reopening that fight. :)
Well, not precisely. Policy says clean should clean up after the
build, and the autotools-dev recommendation makes it programmatically
difficult to do so. In the disagreement between these two, I tend to
think policy is probably more likely to be correct. If the autotools-dev
recommendation is altered to make it simpler to programmatically clean
up to the starting point in the clean target, then they are no longer
disjunct.
> Really not reopening the fight means providing some acceptable path for
> those who would really prefer not to create massive Debian diffs and, more
> importantly, to test building the package from *source* rather than an
> intermediate source form partly generated by the Debian developer.
I can imagine an argument for removing all of the intermediate files
(Makefile.in, configure, etc) in the clean target and rerunning the
autotools stuff from the build target. This would provide a relatively
small diff (provided upstream doesn't ship the intermediate files),
although I am not sure of the wisdom of this approach.
It would be nice if we could support all sorts of forms of rebuilds, but
in practice, what we tend to take seriously is the sort of FTBFS bugs
that will affect the autobuilders. Since they build from an
intermediate form generated by Debian developers (debian/rules), I am
not sure how much we should worry about other use cases.
--
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