Re: autoconf/automake in BuildRequires (fwd)

[Paul Wouters <paul cypherpunks ca>]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> > I clearly remember some packages which have no any ready configure
> > script at all (probably to decrease tarball size). I.e., sometimes it is
> > an upstream's policy to ship only configure.{in|ac} .
> Well, this is a corner case.
>
> On one hand this clearly violates the auto*tools' working principles and
> the GNU standards these tools are based on, on the other hand, if
> upstream doesn't ship the generated files, they must clearly specify
> which versions to use and should be prepared to be flamed for doing a
> bad job.

I believe there is an exception though. I agree with you for FC3/FC4 releases,
but FC5/devel should be allowed to call configure, since software versions in
FC5/devel might want to try out cvs versions of the upstream, which generally
does involve creating configure files using auto* tools.

I am not familiar with how a 'feature freeze' just before a new release is done
happens, so I don't know how/when develoers should then switch to a stable
pre-auto*'ed package.

Paul