In theory, autoconf and automake should be _required_ only when creating
the tarball but not to install from source, so I would also agree to
assume that behaviour and put deviations from that in buildrequires.
I have fallen into that trap more than once after a fresh install...
Many packages actually do follow the gnu coding standards which say
that to do an install from source, you should need only
cat cmp cp diff echo egrep expr false grep gzip install-info
ln ls mkdir mv pwd rm rmdir sed sleep sort tar test touch true
as well as the languages compiler tools with the examples
ar bison cc flex install ld ldconfig lex make makeinfo ranlib
texi2dvi yacc
but not autoconf, automake, perl or bzip2.
Even if Mandrake is (luckily) not bound by these standards and
at least perl and bzip2 are there anyway, the list give a good
hint what packages expect to be there.
Arnd <><
On 22 May 2001, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote:
> Guillaume Rousse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > I beg to disagree : most packages don't need them for building.
>
> "most" : no.
>
> [gc@bi ~/rpm/SPECS] find -name "*.spec" | xargs grep "configure" | perl -ne 'print
>"$1\n" if /^(.*)spec/' | uniq | wc -l
> 252
> [gc@bi ~/rpm/SPECS] find -name "*.spec" | wc -l
> 349
> [gc@bi ~/rpm/SPECS] ruby -e 'p 252/349.0'
> 0.7220630372
>
> > Missing make, or flex, or autoconf, or any explicitly called command is fail
> > fast, and such easy to correct. But here, missing automake causes a vicious
> > bootstraping error that was not so easy to correct...
