autoconf/automake in BuildRequires (fwd)

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 21:51 +0100, Paul Wouters wrote:
> 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,
Pardon, you seem to be mixing up things:

We are discussing running autoconf, automake, libtool etc. from inside
of rpm-specs, i.e. tasks like
* "generating configure from configure.{in|ac}s"
* "generating Makefile.ins from Makefile.ams".
...

"calling configure" is "using the auto*tool generated files".

According to auto*tools' working principles, "calling configure" a task
package integrators (rpm spec authors) are supposed to perform, while
generating auto*tool generated files is the source-package release
manager's ("the person who cuts the tarball") task.

These are two different things.

Ralf