GHC developers take note: when building GHC on a new machine, I encountered a Debian configuration which contained autoreconf but not automake. The attempt to build GHC failed because autoreconf called automake, which was not present.
The message below is part of a discussion about whether autoconf (which contains the autoreconf program) should depend on automake, or whether it should be up to the client (in this case GHC) to have a Build-Depends on automake. The need for both autoconf *and* automake is clearly stated at http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Prerequisites but it might be wise to have a Build-Depends on these packages in debian/control. (Maybe it's there but I missed it.) Norman ------- Forwarded Message From: Ben Pfaff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Norman Ramsey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Ralf Wildenhues <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: dependencies for autoconf Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:08:47 -0800 In bug #262021, Norman Ramsey reported that the "autoreconf" script provided by the autoconf package runs automake. Since at the time autoconf merely recommended automaken, instead of depending on it, this could fail. To fix the bug, I changed the recommendation to a dependency. In response, Ralf Wildenhues <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> pointed out: > Are you going to depend on (some version of) libtool and gettext, too? > autoreconf may invoke libtoolize and autopoint as well. > > FWIW, I don't think this is the right way to go. If autoreconf invokes > aclocal or automake, that means the package being autoreconf'ed depends > on automake, not autoconf. I am torn between the two possibilities. On one hand, Debian policy is clear that packages should have full dependencies on all the programs that they may invoke. On the other hand, Ralf has a reasonable argument that it is the package being autoreconf'd that has the dependency, not autoconf itself. Many packages that use autoconf do not use libtool or gettext. Another issue is that there are multiple versions of automake in the archive. The dependency that I added to autoconf allows any one of them to satisfy the dependency, but of course this is no guarantee that this is the correct version for the package being autoreconf'd. I would appreciate some guidance on this issue from debian-devel. - -- Ben Pfaff http://benpfaff.org ------- End of Forwarded Message -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
