On Nov 5, 2003, at 4:53 PM, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
debhelper puts the following into the "clean" rule in debian/rules:
ifneq "$(wildcard /usr/share/misc/config.sub)" ""
cp -f /usr/share/misc/config.sub config.sub
endif
ifneq "$(wildcard /usr/share/misc/config.guess)" ""
cp -f /usr/share/misc/config.guess config.guess
endif
Three questions:
- why are these two files copied in?
- are they necessary for the build of the program I am packaging?
- they make my .diff.gz file twice their otherwise size; can I delete
that entry from my rules file altogether, or otherwise remove them from
the output?
Zenaan,
My understanding is that these lines ensure that autoconf-based
packages can be easily ported to architectures that are newer than the
software (specifically, newer than the version of autoconf used by the
upstream maintainer when releasing software). If I recall correctly,
this was a particular problem for hppa and ia64, for which many
packages failed to build with old versions of these files (see, for
example bugs.debian.org/103340, which is just the first thing I found
with google).
I suppose (but am not an authority) that an arch: i386 package could
safely do away with these lines. Any package that does not use run
configure would not need these lines either. Further, these lines
would need to be corrected if config.sub and config.guess existed in a
different place in upstream source.
-neil
