Suggested packaging guideline: avoid running autoreconf

[Braden McDaniel]

On Sat, 2008-10-11 at 20:31 +0200, Till Maas wrote:
> On Sat October 11 2008, Braden McDaniel wrote:
> > When the estimate of "300 broken packages" was tossed out in the libtool
> > 2.2.x thread, I figured there was no way *that* many packages could be
> > running autoreconf or libtoolize.  But I have been surprised to find no
> > advice against this practice in Fedora's packaging guidelines; and in
> > light of that, the number is not quite so incredible.
> 
> There is a draft about this at:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/AutoConf

Thanks. I've edited this a bit to include references to libtoolize. I'd
be happy to help move this forward. What's required?

> > While forbidding the use of autoreconf (or similar: autoconf, automake,
> > libtoolize, etc.) in specfiles is probably too extreme, I do think it's
> > appropriate for the packaging guidelines to point out the pitfalls of
> > this practice and advise packagers to avoid it where possible.
> 
> I have read either in the wiki or on this mailing list, that one should run 
> autoreconf locally and create a patch from this, that is then used within the 
> spec.

That is, generally, the right idea.  However, autoreconf is a bit of a
sledgehammer and can result in a patch that is larger than necessary.
The only files that should need patching are configure and Makefile.in.
autoconf will produce the former, and automake the latter.  It is more
unusual, but possible, that ltmain.sh might need patching.  libtoolize
can be used to generate a patch in that case.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <braden at endoframe.com>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <braden at jabber.org>