Auto-stuff patching

[Daniel Holbach]

Hello Cesare,

Am Freitag, den 27.07.2007, 21:47 +0200 schrieb Cesare Tirabassi:
> I have recently stumbled against a couple of packages which needed
> patching the auto-stuff (configure.in, configure.ac, m4 macros etc.)
> I have solved the problem by using the makebuilddir target and invoking
> the needed auto-stuff there.
> I was wondering if there is a preferred or more elegant way to solve
> this problem?
> I have seen mentions of things like DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_ACLOCAL and friends
> but unfortunately I can't find any reference which explains these to
> some detail.

This is one of the questions where you will probably get many answers
depending on who you ask.

There are those who like to have more control over what ends up in the
package diff and who don't like the idea of running autotools on the
build daemon and trust that it just works.

The Ubuntu Desktop Team in most cases split those patches up into one
part that changes configure.ac (for example) and another patch that
changes configure (auto-generated).

E.g.:

daniel at bert:~$ diffstat gedit-2.19.90/debian/patches/01_lpi.patch 
 configure.ac         |    1 +
 gedit/gedit-ui.h     |    1 +
 gedit/gedit-ui.xml   |    3 +++
 gedit/gedit-window.c |    3 +++
 4 files changed, 8 insertions(+)
daniel at bert:~$ diffstat gedit-2.19.90/debian/patches/90_autoconf.patch 
 configure |   10 ++++++++++
 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)
daniel at bert:~$ 

This has the advantage that the 01_* patch will seldom have to be
changed and the 90_* patch is just something like running

   autoconf; rm -r autom4te.cache



Others prefer to automate the process and run autotools on the build
daemon, which in most cases seem to work for them.

Hope that helps.

Have a nice day,
 Daniel

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