[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#1025739: Is an autogenerated configure shell script non-editable source (Was: Bug#1025739: hmmer2: missing source for configure)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Marco

Am Fri, Dec 09, 2022 at 03:33:38PM +0100 schrieb Marco d'Itri:
> On Dec 09, Andreas Tille <andreas at an3as.eu> wrote:
> 
> > I would consider asking upstream about this for sure but the code is in
> > maintenance mode and there is no Git repository to step back in history.
> > The only way to go would be to take configure.ac from a later version
> > and find out how it can be tweaked to create some working configure
> > file from it.  I do not consider my time well spent in doing so except
> > if there is some consensus here on the list that configure files without
> > configure.ac are "missing source".
> If there is no surviving configure.ac which can generate the current 
> configure file then it is quite obvious that this is not a DFSG issue, 
> because no such source exists.

Thanks to Alexander Sulfrian who pointed out the Git repository
featuring old tags that were obviously taken over from SVN I was proven
wrong with the statement that there is no configure.ac any more.

Unfortunately this is no simple drop-in with modern autoconf tools
and my weak attempt in Git to use this failed.[1]

> But if your package contains a manually edited configure file then this
> is a bad practice, and experience shows that sooner or later you will 
> have to deal with the resulting bugs.

I have no reasons to assume that the provided configure was manually
edited.  Its definitely created by old Autoconf (2.57) and can't be
recreated with recent autoconf tools.  But the build works fine with the
configure that is provided.

> Clearly, the severity of these bugs is different, at least as long as 
> your package builds.

This is actually my main point.  Helmut and I have obviously different
opinions about the relevance of the problem regarding DFSG and the
resulting implication for the severity of the bug.  Helmut have stated
good reasons why a recent configure.ac is helpful / important for him
(injecting PKG_CHECK_MODULES) and I would agree with severity important
(to get progress ongoing).  However, waving with the big club DFSG is
IMHO a bit too much in the case of a shell script (no matter how badly
it is written for the intended purpose).

I moved the discussion to debian-devel not primarily for this specific
case (which I intend to fix no matter what severity this bug might
have).  My main point is that we should find some consensus about the
severity of this bug to be clear in other cases we definitely have in
our archive.

Kind regards
   Andreas.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/hmmer2/-/commit/d1f5b3d08391efd66b69090e544803d6bd0f6638

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