Dealing with autotools

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at acm.org> [2009.05.10.0030 +0200]:
> > If I may sum it up in my own words and mix it with my own opinion,
> > then distributions like Debian aren't really necessarily the target
> > audience of the autotools output and it might make a lot more sense
> > for us to build from VCS. This means that autotools would become
> > part of the build process *and* that we rid ourselves of the "dogma"
> > of distributing pristine tar sources.
> 
>         Huh? These do not logically follow. I always autoreconf during
>  the build process for my Debian packages, and yet, I also ship pristine
>  sources. I see no contradiction.

The files generated by autotools are not in VCS, so when you build
from VCS, they don't exist and need to be created as part of the
build process. No tarball involved anymore.

With hibernate, I have an interesting problem: upstream provides
tarballs, and the VCS source is properly tagged, but SVN:keywords
are in use. So if I build against VCS and create the Debian diff
against the pristine tarball, the Debian diff will /revert/ $Id:$
expansions, e.g.

  - $Id: author date snapshot whatever$
  + $Id:$

which isn't ideal either.

-- 
 .''`.   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
 
infinite loop: see 'loop, infinite'.
loop, infinite: see 'infinite loop'.
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