Re: question was: What do we think about always autoreconfing? was: Re: Fedora 35 Change: Autoconf-2.71 (Self-Contained Change proposal))

On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 3:30 PM David Cantrell <dcantrell(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: > On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 11:26:24AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > >Hijacking this thread originally about > >https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Autoconf_271 > > > >What is the current thinking in Fedora about always running > >"autoreconf -i" during builds that use autotools? > > I think we are likely to see the least problems for projects that > created their configure.ac files using autoscan.  For projects that > constructed them manually or in other ways, we'll likely see some > fallout.  I would encourage maintainers to work towards fixing > these > things and contributing them back upstream.  Still, we would need > to > provide a way to disable the autoreconf step for particular > problematic packages. > > Some projects provide their own autotools macros and wrappers > around > autoreconf.  For example, Xfce either provides or provided xdt- > autogen > as a wrapper to run autoreconf with the Xfce-specific macros and > other > defines available.  If it's best to rerun xdt-autogen in these > cases, > how could we handle that in the spec file so it runs the correct > 'autoreconf' command? > > >The cons of always autoreconfing are that it slows down builds, > >sometimes considerably.  It also could fail - I noticed that > autoconf > >2.71 has several incompatibilities with the most widely used > autoconf > >(2.69). > > I think the failures will be the most frustrating part of this > rather > than the build time.  An FAQ or something of how to fix common > failures for 2.71 would be useful for contributors. > Document with common failures and fixes already exists [1]. Also multiple ways of testing are documented in the change proposal [2], where the link to the document [1] is present. Updating autoconf to version 2.71 is a hard process, we are doing our best to make it as fluent as possible. There is a copr created for testing, bugs in bugzilla created (with link to change proposal) for failing components and we are actively moving things forward. Hopefully it will be enough to make this possible. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SAGTJZEF9z_nkHMbXTF-YTTvKRja7ygfOOMzl...

[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Autoconf_271#How_To_Test > > Thanks, > > _______________________________________________ > devel mailing list -- devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org > To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org > Fedora Code of Conduct: > https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ > List Guidelines: > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines > List Archives: > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org > Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: > https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure