On 2024-04-01 16:43, Guillem Jover wrote: > But if as a downstream distribution I explicitly request everything > to be considered obsolete via --force, then I really do want to get > whatever is in the system instead of in the upstream package.
If I distribute a release package, what I have tested is exactly what is in that package. If you start replacing different versions of m4 macros, or use some distribution-patched autoconf/automake/libtool or whatever, then this you have invalidated any and all release testing. This is fine, modifying a package and distributing modified versions are freedoms 1 and 3, but if it breaks you keep both pieces. The aclocal --install feature should be seen as a feature to help update dependencies as part of the process of preparing a modified version, not something that should ever be routinely performed by system integrators. GNU/Linux distributions have a long history of buggy backports to the autotools. For a recent example, Gentoo shipped a broken libtool 2.4.6 which included a patch to make Gentoo installs go faster but if you prepared a package with this broken libtool version, the resulting package would not build on HP-UX, oops. Cheers, Nick
