Luca Boccassi <bl...@debian.org> writes: > In the end, massaged tarballs were needed to avoid rerunning autoconfery > on twelve thousands different proprietary and non-proprietary Unix > variants, back in the day. In 2024, we do dh_autoreconf by default so > it's all moot anyway.
This is true from Debian's perspective. This is much less obviously true from upstream's perspective, and there are some advantages to aligning with upstream about what constitutes the release artifact. > When using Meson/CMake/home-grown makefiles there's no meaningful > difference on average, although I'm sure there are corner cases and > exceptions here and there. Yes, perhaps it's time to switch to a different build system, although one of the reasons I've personally been putting this off is that I do a lot of feature probing for library APIs that have changed over time, and I'm not sure how one does that in the non-Autoconf build systems. Meson's Porting from Autotools [1] page, for example, doesn't seem to address this use case at all. [1] https://mesonbuild.com/Porting-from-autotools.html Maybe the answer is "you should give up on portability to older systems as the cost of having a cleaner build system," and that's not an entirely unreasonable thing to say, but that's going to be a hard sell for a lot of upstreams that care immensely about this. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
