Re: Reautoconfing
On 2020-12-20 13:37 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote: > On 12/20/20 12:25 PM, Wookey wrote: > > We realise that it was/is not the autotools design, but that design > > only works well when the auto* bits get updated reasonably often. > > Yes, the design assumes that Autoconf etc. are maintained well, which > (except for Zack's efforts) has not been the case for a while. This part of > the GNU ecosystem needs more help, as the rare volunteers are spread way too > thin. Just to clarify here: I was talking about software projects that _use_ autotools being very infrequently updated, not autotools itself. Even if autotools was being updated assiduously that doesn't change a tarball last released 10 years ago, still being built in a modern distro. Nor projects that do new releases but don't reautoconf themselves and just cargo cult the autofoo they had working from last time, which I have also seen way too much of. I realise that my comment could in fact be read either way - apologies for lack of clarity. No criticism was implied of the people keeping autotools itself going. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Reautoconfing
On 12/20/20 12:25 PM, Wookey wrote: We realise that it was/is not the autotools design, but that design only works well when the auto* bits get updated reasonably often. Yes, the design assumes that Autoconf etc. are maintained well, which (except for Zack's efforts) has not been the case for a while. This part of the GNU ecosystem needs more help, as the rare volunteers are spread way too thin.
Re: Reautoconfing
On 2020-12-20 17:46 +0100, Bruno Haible wrote: > This patch is already in Gnulib since 2020-12-09. But when people > run 'autoreconf' on an existing released tarball, they are effectively > combining an older Gnulib with a newest Autoconf. > > Why do people do that? The point of tarballs is that you can run > './configure' right away. Because on balance, over the long term, it works better. This page explains why debian now does this by default: https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf We realise that it was/is not the autotools design, but that design only works well when the auto* bits get updated reasonably often. If they just get left (because the last relase was a decade ago) or copied over into releases but never actually updated for years and years (which often happens in practice) they can (and in my experience often do) get badly out of sync with the surrounding world. Testing that things build with the tools now, as opposed to the tools available when the tarball was generated, demonstrates that the software can still be built from source. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
