Chris Staub wrote:
3. Drop autoconf, automake, and libtool, or move them to BLFS. I doubt
many non-software-developers actually use them. I never do...
I've done done a check myself in recent months. The reason for autoconf,
automake, and libtool being in the book is to satisfy dependencies. Off
the top of my head I don't recall anymore which package(s) require(s) them.
Aside from dependencies my other reason for keeping those packages in
there are two-fold:
1) I consider them part of a well rounded development system.
2) Probably the more important one: if you apply a patch to a package
that modifies files like configure.in and Makefile.am, you need autoconf
and automake (respectively) to rebuild the configure and Makefile.in files.
This kind of patch might not be too common (most just modify configure
and Makefile.in directly as that is much easier to work with), but I
have seen it happen.
One could argue a possible run-time dependency of the "patch" package
are the autoconf and automake packages in certain special cases.
Libtool is sometimes used during library installations. You'll see a lot
of packages come with a libtool script, but /usr/bin/libtool is used too
from time to time.
--
Gerard Beekmans
/* If Linux doesn't have the solution, you have the wrong problem */
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