[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#1025739: Is an autogenerated configure shell script non-editable source

[Andreas Tille]

Am Fri, Dec 09, 2022 at 11:58:56AM -0800 schrieb Russ Allbery:
> The real problem in this case is less about the DFSG and more about the
> practical problems of maintaining Debian as a software distribution: if we
> can't regenerate configure using software in Debian, there are a lot of
> porting tasks and some bug-fixing tasks that we can't do, and that's a
> problem for us.  But I'm dubious that it's a *software freedom* problem;
> it's more of a *software maintenance* problem, and thus the bug severity
> should be based on how much of a problem that is in practice.

The situation of hmmer2 is that upstream went to hmmer3 which is despite
its same name something different.  The Debian Med team keeps on
maintaining that old code since scientists need this to have comparable
results with former research.  I guess its simple enough to even craft a
new configure.ac (or backport the one for hmmer3) if needed and the fact
that Helmit stumbled upon it to enhance pkg-config compatibility is a
good reason for a bug report with severity somewhere between wishlist
and important.  We try to fix any bug (no matter what severity) and in
the current Debian Med Advent bug squashing party we try to approach
this.

However, since we can not guarantee that the bug is solved quickly a
serious bug might have the consequence that the package might not be
shipped with bookworm which is definitely not in the interest of our
users.

So far for the actual case (bug report in CC).

For the general case I somehow understand the consensus here on the list
that a missing configure.ac can be considered a bug but the severity
serious is not really rectified.  If I understood this correctly I would
reset the severity to important at the beginning of next week.

Kind regards
   Andreas.

-- 
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