Billinghurst, David (CRTS) wrote: > I'd prefer the re-autotool stuff to be part of the user build process. > I was going to propose this for ImageMagick, as it reduces the patches > from approx 1 Mb down to 2 lines. Much easier to understand.
IMO, this is a maintainer decision. If David wants to keep the cygwin "fork" small, but require the autotools to build-from-source, that's up to him. Some existing packages do it that way; others include a massively huge "re-autotool" patch in the -src package. Either way. Ideally, David's method is "better" -- because that way it's easier to "up-port" the cygwin fork to a new version, it's clear what the "important" changes are that need to be pushed upstream, etc. However, it's harder for the cygwin maintainer to keep things separate -- especially the "./foo-VER-REL.sh spkg" step, because the mkpatch sub-step becomes tricky if not impossible to automate...therefore, you have to manually maintain the (small) patch. I tend to use David's method when I'm syncing against source in a CVS repository (libtool, a few others). I tend to just say "ah, the heck with it" and ship a mega-patch in other cases. FWIW, I haven't had a chance to look specifically at David's gnupg package yet. I'll try to do so tomorrow -- but I'm on dailup now... :-( --Chuck
