❦ 24 décembre 2013 18:33 CET, Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> :
> Mostly the patches I've sent for these things have either been ignored
> until NMUed, or applied without complaint, but I've found that I've
> ended up in arguments with a small number of maintainers who have (IMO)
> irrational objections to updating config.guess/sub automatically,
> generally based on either confusing it with autoreconf and incorrectly
> believing that it has similar levels of breakage, or hanging onto a
> more-than-15-year-old grudge about GNU config triplet changes in the
> dawn of time. I'd be happy to take this to the TC if necessary, but
> it's relatively minor and I figure we have enough to do. :-)
[...]
I don't remember you advocating for automatically update
config.guess/sub. However, I remember you for advocating automatic
autoreconf. Having both positions make it easier for people (like me) to
be confused about them.
> Yes, although note that the upcoming ppc64el port will require a full
> autoreconf for anything that uses libtool, because it requires a libtool
> patch that hasn't yet been part of a stable libtool release and is
> generally very poorly deployed in the generated autotools files shipped
> in upstream packages. I've been sending rather a lot of patches to
> convert things to dh-autoreconf over the last couple of weeks. It is,
> IMO, clearly the better path (both for long-term porting needs and in
> the ethical sense that it makes it easier for users to change the true
> source code for the build system), but it does require a bit more
> knowledge and effort from maintainers.
I have no problem with automatically updating config.guess/sub but I
have one with automatic autoreconf: as automake doesn't seem to care
about forward or backward-compatibility, using autoreconf will lead to
additional work for the maintainer: backporting may be harder because
automake is too old, FTBFS may happen from time to time because automake
introduced an incompatible change, etc.
If we get automatic config.guess/sub handling by dh, maybe we could just
libtool-generated files as well?
--
Make sure all variables are initialised before use.
- The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plauger)
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
