Dealing with autotools

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 09:05:25AM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at acm.org> [2009.05.10.0030 +0200]:
> >         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.

I _think_ that Manoj's point was more about the fact that re-creating
the auto* files are not (necessarily) part of the trust relationship
that users put into the pristine-ness of upstream tarball.

I personally agree with that. As such, in a near future I would have
no problem in letting user putting their trust in the checksum of our
"upstream" branch being in sync with the checksum of upstream tag. The
main drawback of that is requiring homogeneity of VCS technology
between packagers and upstream.

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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