Comment 14 for bug 13458

Message-ID: <email address hidden>
Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 10:51:22 -0600
From: Rob Browning <email address hidden>
To: =?iso-8859-1?q?J=E9r=F4me_Marant?= <email address hidden>
Cc: <email address hidden>, Kurt Roeckx <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: Bug#297796: emacs21: FTBFS: timestamp skew issues.

J=E9r=F4me Marant <email address hidden> writes:

> To my mind, we should avoid to do this automatically from the makefile
> and generate a dpatch manually every we have to regenerate the
> configure script.

We certainly could generate the patch manually, and that would be
simpler, but it would also leave a lot of room for mistakes,
especially when someone else wants to hack on the package. They won't
know that they (may) need to regenerate the autofiles.diff after they
add a new patch or change an existing one.

Whatever we do, we'll still need to make sure the autofiles patch is
the final patch, since any of the other patches might make changes
that affect the autotools behavior.

> Currently, the only file which is modified when changing configure.in
> is configure, so this should be straightforward.

True, though there's no guarantee of that. Some newer version of
autoconf or aclocal could create extra files or pay attention to
source tree elements that older versions didn't. That's the reason
for the current approach:

  - apply all the other patches to a temp tree
  - run the appropriate autofoo on the temp tree
  - diff the temp tree and the original tree

More generally, even though the current autofiles.diff patch for
emacs21 only contains changes to configure, I was hoping to create a
solution that was as automatic as possible, one that could work on any
package using the autotools. A key presumption was that there's no
way to predict what changes a given version of the autotools might
make to the source tree (especially in cases where additional
autotools like automake and libtool are involved).

--=20
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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