Re: Increasing regularity of build systems

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On 18 Sep 1999, James LewisMoss wrote:

> >>>>> On Fri, 17 Sep 1999 11:13:49 +0200 (CET), Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> said:
> 
>  Santiago> David Welton wrote:
>  >> Xemacs21 - runs *autoconf* to generate other makefiles, which are
>  >> then run.  [...]
> 
> autoconf doesn't generate makefiles.  It generates a configure file.

Yes, you are right.

>  Santiago> Well, for this particular case (xemacs21), I think that
>  Santiago> running autoconf in the debian/rules file is "bad per se",
>  Santiago> and should be discouraged at least, if not forbidden by
>  Santiago> policy (I guess it is already forbidden by the GNU
>  Santiago> standards).
> 
> [...]
> There actually is a
> reason it was done (the configure.in file was modified.  Know any
> other way to recreate the configure file?).

Well, it depends :-) Clearly, if you modify configure.in then you have to
run autoconf sooner or later. However, you may arrange things so that
running autoconf is not needed by the build process by running autoconf
by hand, only once, before creating the Debian source (you might want
to use a special target in debian/rules for this, like "refresh-configure"
or something alike, if you dislike doing it completely by hand).

This way people will be able to build the Debian package without autoconf,
as they were already able to do with the original upstream source.

> As it is this is no longer neccessary and will go away (patch upstream 
> fixes the problem I was having).
>
> At least I did remove the configure file so that the patch wasn't
> ungodly large.

I don't think it is needed to remove the configure script in this case.
A big patch is "ugly", of course, but running autoconf in the build
process is ugly too, is some way.

Thanks.

-- 
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