Julien Puydt <julien.pu...@gmail.com> writes: > If you use autotools, you start with configure.ac and .in files. If > upstream prepared the tree (as they generally do), you also get a > libtool/configure, etc. From this, you can run ./configure && make && > make install ; that will do substitutions in the .in files. And if you > want to start anew, you can use autoconf/autoheader/whatever to re- > create the configure/libtool script and then ./configure && make && > make install.
This is a long-standing misunderstanding in the Debian community. There is no guarantee that autoconf/autoheader/whatever re-create all generated autotools files. In fact, there are several examples of situations where they are not re-generated (e.g., modified aclocal *.m4 files without bumping serial number) and this is intentional upstream behaviour from autotools and there are no signs that this will change. To be certain to not get pre-generated files, one approach is to not use tarballs with pre-generated content at all, but to insist on packaging autotools projects based on git content; few upstreams commit generated files into git so this ought to be the safest approach. Look at 'inetutils' in Debian for an example. Another is to manually prepare a 'rm' list of files to remove in debian/rules, or to use debian/copyright Files-Excluded; to remove all generated autotools files. /Simon
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