Re: autoconf/automake in BuildRequires

[Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 freenet de>]

On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 15:31 +0300, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> According to wiki/PackagingGuidelines, there is exceptions list for 
> BuildRequires tag:
> 
> > There is no need to include the following packages or their 
> > dependencies as BuildRequires because they would occur too often. 
> > These packages are considered the minimum build environment.
> >
> Autoconf and automake are not present in this list, therefore they must 
> be specified in the BuildRequires tag. OTOH it looks as some basic 
> tools... May be autoconf and automake should be included in the 
> exception list too?
Never.

Any package requiring them is _broken_. Such bugs should be reported
upstream and fixed there.

Also running any autotool as part of building a package imposes
non-negligible risks to silently break packages.

If I were to decide, I would reject any package trying to run any
autotool - Packagers should learn to use patches instead.

Sorry, if this sounds hard, but here, I do have a very strong opinion.

Ralf