Hello, The current best practice for dealing with packages using GNU autotools (as described in /usr/share/doc/autotools-dev/README.Debian.gz) is to run autoreconf in a prerequisite of a build target, and to remove its results in the clean target.
However that README does not give any hints on how to best do the cleaning. How are others doing it? I could think of the following ways: * maintain a blacklist of generated files, and "rm" them in the clean target. This has the downside that as soon as any of: - automake - aclocal - autoconf - autopoint - autoheader - libtoolize decides to introduce a new autogenerated file, my package is going to collect cruft on a sourceful rebuild (e.g. NMUs). And because of the time skew problems, it is cruft which can potentially break the build in subtle ways. Looking (for example) at the amazing list of files that autopoint copies into the po/ subdirectory, I have very little faith that something new won't appear in the future. The only way this would be acceptable was if there was a way to make dpkg-build abort if added files are found outside the debian directory. That would cause the person building the package to add any new files to the blacklist. OTOH the security team probably wouldn't like it? * maintain a whitelist of distributed files, and "rm" everything else (apart from the debian directory) in the clean target. Since I use (or plan to use) git-buildpackage, I don't have a tarball which could serve as an authoritative whitelist. Thus an additional whitelist refresh step would be required every time I merge the upstream branch into the debian branch. That's bad. Furthermore, a whitelist approach would mercilessly elliminate all files on a "clean", so one would have to be really careful not to leave unchecked but precious files in the source tree at any time... :-/ * for every autoool, maintain an anti-autotool that would know how to revert the actions of its counterpart. Basically just like automake-generated files encode the knowledge of how to "make clean" after a "make all", there would need to be a "-clean" counterpart for every autotool that autoreconf can call. However this would need to be a team effort, as such cleanup tools would need to closely follow their "generator" counterparts. Are there other ways? Comments? regards, -- Marcin Owsiany <porri...@debian.org> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/ GnuPG: 1024D/60F41216 FE67 DA2D 0ACA FC5E 3F75 D6F6 3A0D 8AA0 60F4 1216 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110315222957.GA5440@beczulka
