On Jul 8, 2012, at 11:46 PM, Eelco Dolstra <eelco.dols...@logicblox.com> wrote:
> Hi, > > On 07/07/12 09:55, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > >> Golden Rule: >> >> Never ever add a dependency on Autoconf, Automake, or Libtool, unless >> you’re confident that you cannot do otherwise at all. >> >> The point of these tools is precisely that they don’t need to be present >> when installing from a tarball (unlike CMake, for instance.) >> >> When a package’s build system needs to be patched, we must try hard to >> patch generated files, such as ‘Makefile.in’ or ‘configure’, to avoid >> having to depend on the autotools. > > Patching generated files seems like a violation of some other Golden Rule :-) > > Maybe a better solution, given the track record of the Autotools with respect > to > backwards compatibility, is that packages should depend on a particular > version > of the Autotools (e.g. "automake_1_11"). To encourage that we should remove > the > "automake" and "autoconf" attributes from all-packages.nix. +1. Is there ever a case where some nifty new autotools feature meaningfully changes a package other than going from broken->fixed or vice versa? > > -- > Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/ > _______________________________________________ > nix-dev mailing list > nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl > http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev