Re: Autoconf with Debian patches

[Guy Harris via tcpdump-workers <tcpdump-workers () lists tcpdump org>]

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> From: Guy Harris <gharris () sonic net>
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> Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2023 14:49:54 -0800
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> On Jan 6, 2023, at 2:24 PM, Denis Ovsienko <denis () ovsienko info> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 6 Jan 2023 13:25:14 -0800
> > Guy Harris <gharris () sonic net> wrote:
> >
> > > If we switch to making Debian Autoconf the new standard and keeping
> > > the generated configure script in the repository, would that mean
> > > that developers working from the repository would either have to
> > > install Debian Autoconf or use "git add -p" instead of "git add"?
> >
> > Yes.  Right now it is the other way around (contributors that use
> > Debian or its derivatives have to filter their output).  So perhaps
> > this switch would not be convenient for macOS and FreeBSD users.
>
> If we go that way, we should document it when addressing developers.
>
> Is there a place where people can download a tarball for Debian autoconf and just do ./configure, make, and make 
> install, or will they have to download the Debian package and apply the patches?  If the latter, we should, at minimum, 
> give documentation on how to do that - or we could just do that ourselves and have a "Debian autoconf" source tarball 
> to download.
>
> An alternative would be *not* to keep the generated configure script in the repository (that's what Wireshark ended up 
> doing before it ceased to use autoconf/automake), and generate it as part of the release-build process, which we would 
> do on a machine on which Debian autoconf was installed.
>
> That requires that developers have autoconf installed if they're not going to be using CMake, but there are already 
> tools they need installed (a C compiler, make, Flex, Bison/Berkeley YACC, ...) so I don't see that as a problem.
>
> It also means that configure.ac and aclocal.m4 would have to work with various sufficiently-recent versions of autoconf.
>
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