Status of libtool 2.2.X?

[Dan Nicholson]

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 3:21 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 05:20:30PM -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
>> A copy of the libtool script is typically included in a package.
>> Breakage such as that patch fixes would only be incurred if
>> libtoolize/autoreconf were run as part of the build process--something
>> that simply shouldn't be happening in general for RPM builds.
>
> If I parse that correctly, are you saying that autoreconf *shouldn't*
> be run as part of an RPM build?

That's what he's saying. The main goal of the autotools is that the
package comes to you ready to build with just basic unix tools: shell,
make, compiler/linker. So, you tend to not want to try to regenerate
the build files on your own. Especially since the procedure some
projects use can be fragile at best. autoreconf usually does the right
thing, though.

> I have found that it sometimes needs autoreconf if I patch the
> configure.ac script -- something which happens rather more frequently
> when porting to MinGW.  (After these patches go upstream then it won't
> be a problem of course).

You always need to run autoconf again if you've patched the
configure.ac file, or nothing happens. You can run autoreconf locally
and add the regenerated configure/aclocal.m4 to your patch, but it
will be severely bloated.

I tend to think it's not bad to regenerate the autotools. It's usually
cleaner and more robust to just fix the files at the source (like
you're doing) than to try to hack around it.

--
Dan