On Tue, 25 Oct 2011, Adam Borowski wrote: > If they use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE and it's "disabled" [1], there's no way to > check if they aren't in DFSG and/or GPL violation by shipping sourceless > code. Forbidding it would at least deal with patching autotools output > rather than source.
As a rule, you are supposed to get rid of all autogenerated files and rebuild them from scratch when packaging for Debian. AM_MAINTAINER_MODE changes nothing in that case, as you will readly notice any upstream breakage when you try to build the package after importing a new upstream release. Granted, there are exceptions to all rules, but autotools has not been one for more than a decade. In fact, we had a LOT of breakage over the years because maintainers built packages with whatever buggy autotooling upstream used, instead of retooling. libtool was the worst source of nastyness, but even the simple stuff like GNU config (config.sub/.guess) caused some trouble. > I don't get why, when everything else has to be built from source, > AM_MAINTAINER_MODE gets an exemption. AFAIK, it doesn't get any exceptions, at least not in Debian. What happens is that we do not pressure people nearly as much as we could at the "rebuild everything autogenerated from source when not impossible" thing in Debian, which means maintainers don't get pressured into retooling build systems and rebuilding intermediate files. And that happens because a large number of maintainers and upstreams really don't care at all for the build system of whatever they're building. Not that I know of any good buildsystems: autotools and cmake are both hideous. Still, one has to strike a balance between distro quality, and taking out the fun of maintaining packages for a lot of people... so we don't complain of a half-done job until it breaks something. After all, chances are good that you'll find that *you* have to fix upstream's build-system and keep it in good order. Not everyone thinks this should be part of the downstream maintainer's call of duty. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111025122824.ga6...@khazad-dum.debian.net
