On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 10:10:42AM +0200, Sirius wrote: > Not worth boiling the ocean over, but is there an estimate of how many > packaged projects have customisations to their autoconf that is not found > in the upstream autoconf project? If that number is low single digit > percent, it may motivate those projects to upstream their modifications. > If it is double digits percent, it might not be possible to disallow > vendoring the files.
This is difficult to answer because it's comparing apples and oranges to some extent: not all autoconf customizations are vendored or would make any kind of sense to upstream. For example, https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/blob/main/m4/man-arg-config-file.m4 is obviously specific to that project; it's just in a separate file for the same reasons that projects past a certain size don't typically put all their code in a single file. I suspect the question you're aiming for is something like "how many packaged projects have copied autoconf macros from elsewhere and modified them but kept the same file names, so that a naïve attempt to update them would drop those modifications". My guess is that the number here is very low - IME it's much more common in such cases to either rename the macro file to be obviously project-specific or to find some workaround that doesn't require changing the upstream macro - but I've never seen anything resembling a robust analysis of this and I may well have a skewed view. -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]