tracking upstream's git repo and autotools

[Russ Allbery]

Pierre Habouzit <pierre.habouzit at m4x.org> writes:

>   It takes a lot of time, and prevents builds repeatability, in the
> sense that when autotools have backward compatibility issues, it breaks,
> not to mention that you need all the *.m4 files around to generate the
> configure properly.

I tend to be on the side that says that the input files to autotools are
the real source and it's usually better to build the whole package from
source, particularly when upstream isn't shipping pre-built files for
convenience.

It does mean that part of the build process is arch-independent, but
generally running the autotools doesn't take *that* long compared to the
actual compilation, and it's hardly the only arch-independent part of
package builds we have.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>