Lindsay Haisley writes:
On Sun, 2008-05-11 at 09:34 -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:Get rid of all that jazz with rerunning autoconf and automake. This is not needed on any other distro, and should not be needed on Gentoo.Sam, I'm sure you have strong opinions about distributions and how they should work, but the fact is that Gentoo _relies_ on building executable from source on the target system.
All the source that's needed to build Courier is in the tarball. What running autoconf and automake does is replace parts of the source code with potentially different versions of autoconf and automake-generated code. This never fixes anything, and, potentially creates more problems.
Other distributions make it optional,
and as per Open Source policy source code is always available.
The golden standard for FOSS policy is Debian, and I do not believe that Debian does anything like that. All the source needed to build Courier is in the tarball. If Gentoo needs to replace some of the source code with a different version of autoconf or automake-generated robocode, Gentoo must accept the responsibility for making it work, and fixing any issues that are caused by it.
The Gentoo courier ebuild maintainer has chosen, for reasons that I won't second-guess, to rerun the autotools on the source tree. Whether
Well, you should second-guess. Nobody's infallible. People make mistakes. This is a mistake.
By far the easiest solution would be for you to include the pcp/m4 files in the source tree. It's less than 150K of space, and will make my life a _whole_ lot easier, along with probably a number of other folks who use Gentoo Linux and appreciate the design and quality of Courier.
I already agreed to do that, but this is only going to see the light of day on the next build. As you've noticed, given that the code is generally mature and stable, things no longer happen at the same rapid pace as they were humming along a few years ago, so it'll probably be a little while before that happens.
Getting the Gentoo ebuild maintainer to redesign the way the ebuild works, or getting the Gentoo Project leaders to move away from the basic paradigm of the distro is problematic to impossible. You're the man, Sam. Please help us out here.
Nobody's asking them to change any paradigm. All they need to do is fix their broken build. It is broken, period. There's no need to rebuild autoconf and automake-generated code. Doing so won't make the code any more or less free. This should only be done to actually address issues that prevent the code from actually getting built on the distribution. If configure+make works, there's no need to rebuild the autoconf and automake scripts. I have not heard anybody claim that there's a configuration issue that prevents the as-given configuration script from working correctly.
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