tracking upstream's git repo and autotools

[Russ Allbery]

martin f krafft <madduck at madduck.net> writes:
> also sprach Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> [2008.02.17.0033 +0100]:

>> I would just Build-Depend on autoconf, automake, and the like and run
>> them during the build.
>
> This is generally frowned upon in Debian, at least I think they
> should not be build dependencies.

It's been discussed frequently and there are people who hold that
position, but also a lot of people who hold other positions.  We've just
gone through another round of this recently.  I think it's fair to say
that there's no consensus on this point within Debian.

See http://bugs.debian.org/397939 for some of the very extensive and
inconclusive discussion.

/usr/share/doc/autotools-dev/README.Debian.gz is the best consensus
document that we have at present, and it lays out both options.  (Note
that the time-stamp skew problem in dpkg-source has since been fixed.)

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