Dealing with autotools

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> [2009.05.09.1842 +0200]:
> There are advantages to using tarballs.  Whether they outweigh the
> convenience of building directly from VCS is certainly up for
> debate (and has been debated many times on Fedora devel list,
> among other places ;-)

Pointers always welcome. ;)

> One of the reasons I remember as actually having validity was that
> tarballs have a large test base vs an SCM snapshot.  (Even if you
> build from a tag, you have to depend on upstream having tagged the
> correct version that actually got into the tarball).

Isn't this something the maintainer could quickly check?

Also, are you sure of the large test base? The most important
package I maintain is mdadm, and I don't know a single person who
uses it directly, other than through Doug's or my packages. I admit
I don't know any !(Fedora||Debian*) users though, except for
upstream himself, who uses OpenSuse.

mdadm ist Linux-only, the whole picture changes when you think about
something like postfix. However, do you think that those folks who
rebuild their software for every upstream release are really going
to be a better test base than a new postfix package with 10 days to
survive in Debian unstable (or the same concept for other distros)?

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at d.o>      Related projects:
: :'  :  proud Debian developer               http://debiansystem.info
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck    http://vcs-pkg.org
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
 
"it usually takes more than three weeks
 to prepare a good impromptu speech.
                                                         -- mark twain
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