Bug#397939: Lintian: outdated-autotools-helper-file
Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org> writes:
> A workaround could be to not regenerate the files. This is how it is
> usually done now. IMO that is incorrect, because the compiler for every
> generated file must be in Debian. The current practise of not rerunning
> autotools makes this rule technically unnecessary, but it can still be
> violated (and that should still be considered a bug, even if it doesn't
> result in a build failure).
Note that libtool is an unusual case here and isn't the same as Autoconf
or Automake. The files included in the package (libtool.m4 and ltmain.sh)
are not generated files in the same sense. Running libtoolize basically
just copies those files from the installed libtool into the package.
I think (but am not at all certain) that ltmain.sh is a generated file in
that I don't think it's maintained in that form by the libtool
maintainers, but if so, whatever generation is done is already done as
part of the installation of libtool.
It's not like Autoconf or Automake where a file in the source is used as
input to a compiler which generates a shell script based on it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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