Re: autoreconf on build
On Sat, 24 Jan 2015 21:15:11 + Richard W.M. Jones rjo...@redhat.com wrote: On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 07:42:20PM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote: On 01/24/2015 03:14 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: I notice that Debian recently [since July 2014] started to recommend that packagers run autoreconf on build. Their reasons are given here and seem to be good ones: https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf In the interests of fairness I can think of two drawbacks too: - newer versions of (especially) automake have not always been improvements, and some upstreams may wish to stick with older ones - autoreconf is slow Debian have probably hit most of the bugs by now, and I think this is a good recommendation that perhaps Fedora packagers should be encouraged to follow too. What do you think? This is bad advice. Autoreconf only works if a package has been prepared for it and if a package is actively maintained. ... which would be a bug in the upstream package. But yes I agree this is possibly controversial. On the other hand Debian likely will have encountered these bugs before us. I have a number of packages that do this for .. reasons ... and every time rawhide uses a new automake some of them have issues :( So it is not an effort free recommendation, and should be done carefully. In many other cases autoreconf can cause subtile and hard to find issues. In complex cases, it doesn't work at all. Again, bugs in the upstream package. Which, you may not always be able to address timely, and osme times it makes no sense to, because the changer is a gratuitous one, in one of the autotools. Simo. -- Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
Re: autoreconf on build
Richard W.M. Jones wrote: I notice that Debian recently [since July 2014] started to recommend that packagers run autoreconf on build. Their reasons are given here and seem to be good ones: https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf I've been arguing in favor of such a policy several times, see the mailing list archives. The main reason is that IMHO generated autoconf files are binary blobs to the same extent as prebuilt JARs, SWFs or ELF executables, which we all disallow. And those files that are copied verbatim are bundled libraries, which we also disallow. We should build from the true source code. It also makes it easier to make any changes to the build files if needed, without having to figure out first how to change the package to run autoreconf. Kevin Kofler -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
autoreconf on build
I notice that Debian recently [since July 2014] started to recommend that packagers run autoreconf on build. Their reasons are given here and seem to be good ones: https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf In the interests of fairness I can think of two drawbacks too: - newer versions of (especially) automake have not always been improvements, and some upstreams may wish to stick with older ones - autoreconf is slow Debian have probably hit most of the bugs by now, and I think this is a good recommendation that perhaps Fedora packagers should be encouraged to follow too. What do you think? Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
Re: autoreconf on build
On 01/24/2015 03:14 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: I notice that Debian recently [since July 2014] started to recommend that packagers run autoreconf on build. Their reasons are given here and seem to be good ones: https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf In the interests of fairness I can think of two drawbacks too: - newer versions of (especially) automake have not always been improvements, and some upstreams may wish to stick with older ones - autoreconf is slow Debian have probably hit most of the bugs by now, and I think this is a good recommendation that perhaps Fedora packagers should be encouraged to follow too. What do you think? This is bad advice. Autoreconf only works if a package has been prepared for it and if a package is actively maintained. In many other cases autoreconf can cause subtile and hard to find issues. In complex cases, it doesn't work at all. Ralf -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
Re: autoreconf on build
On Sat, 24 Jan 2015 19:42:20 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote: In many other cases autoreconf can cause subtile and hard to find issues. In complex cases, it doesn't work at all. Especially the former can be troublesome if they don't cause a build to fail. For example, it can lead to issues such as undefined/unsubstituted macros, dropped lines from Makefile*.in templates, files like config.h.in or even m4 files. Packaging guidelines that ask packagers to run autoreconf always will lead to packagers adding something to a spec file without spending extra time on carefully examining the results. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
Re: autoreconf on build
On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 07:42:20PM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote: On 01/24/2015 03:14 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: I notice that Debian recently [since July 2014] started to recommend that packagers run autoreconf on build. Their reasons are given here and seem to be good ones: https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf In the interests of fairness I can think of two drawbacks too: - newer versions of (especially) automake have not always been improvements, and some upstreams may wish to stick with older ones - autoreconf is slow Debian have probably hit most of the bugs by now, and I think this is a good recommendation that perhaps Fedora packagers should be encouraged to follow too. What do you think? This is bad advice. Autoreconf only works if a package has been prepared for it and if a package is actively maintained. ... which would be a bug in the upstream package. But yes I agree this is possibly controversial. On the other hand Debian likely will have encountered these bugs before us. In many other cases autoreconf can cause subtile and hard to find issues. In complex cases, it doesn't work at all. Again, bugs in the upstream package. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
