On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 01:19 -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 10:50 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway
wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 01:16 -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
> > I would like to make some progress on this:
> >
> > <
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/AutoConf>
> >
> > The goal, I think, is incorporation of something like this into Fedora's
> > Packaging Guidelines. I'm told this is the place to come.
>
> This is the right place... do you feel that Draft is ready for us to
> consider it for inclusion in the Packaging Guidelines as is?
After some discussion on fedora-devel, I'd say "not yet".
ACK.
While I do think it's appropriate to steer packagers toward
patching
configure and Makefile.in for trivial cases, I'm coming around to the
notion that for more complex cases the prose should restrict itself to
being informational.
Not ACK. Patching auto-tools sources and generated files is
always
preferred, because only this guarantees deterministic builds.
If I were to decide, I would ban all calls to the autotools inside of
specs, unfortunately, many people do not want to accept this thought,
and consider running the autotools inside of *specs to be superior.
It's not a secret, I consider this practice to be "naive maintainers
outsmarting themselves" and these people to be exposing Fedora packages
to risks.
Unfortunately, I am preaching at walls :)
But I continue to think that certain invocations
of the tools should be practically forbidden. ("autoreconf -f", I'm
looking at you.)
autoreconf is just a wrapper aiming at automating invocations of the
tools underneath and at replacing the plethora of (often broken)
"bootstrap.sh / autogen.sh etc." scripts.
So, if you intend to ban autoreconf, you should be consequent and ban
all calls to the autotools.
If you are aiming at banning "autoreconf -f" (Note: -f), then you are
right, "autoreconf -f" is harmful in many cases.
Ralf