On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 3:30 PM David Cantrell <dcantrell@redhat.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 11:26:24AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>Hijacking this thread originally about
>https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Autoconf_271
>
>What is the current thinking in Fedora about always running
>"autoreconf -i" during builds that use autotools?

I think we are likely to see the least problems for projects that
created their configure.ac files using autoscan.  For projects that
constructed them manually or in other ways, we'll likely see some
fallout.  I would encourage maintainers to work towards fixing these
things and contributing them back upstream.  Still, we would need to
provide a way to disable the autoreconf step for particular
problematic packages.

Some projects provide their own autotools macros and wrappers around
autoreconf.  For example, Xfce either provides or provided xdt-autogen
as a wrapper to run autoreconf with the Xfce-specific macros and other
defines available.  If it's best to rerun xdt-autogen in these cases,
how could we handle that in the spec file so it runs the correct
'autoreconf' command?

>The cons of always autoreconfing are that it slows down builds,
>sometimes considerably.  It also could fail - I noticed that autoconf
>2.71 has several incompatibilities with the most widely used autoconf
>(2.69).

I think the failures will be the most frustrating part of this rather
than the build time.  An FAQ or something of how to fix common
failures for 2.71 would be useful for contributors.

Document with common failures and fixes already exists [1]. Also multiple ways of testing are documented in the change proposal [2], where the link to the document [1] is present.

Updating autoconf to version 2.71 is a hard process, we are doing our best to make it as fluent as possible. There is a copr created for testing, bugs in bugzilla created (with link to change proposal) for failing components and we are actively moving things forward.

Hopefully it will be enough to make this possible.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SAGTJZEF9z_nkHMbXTF-YTTvKRja7ygfOOMzl-DYBSk/edit
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Autoconf_271#How_To_Test



Thanks,

--
David Cantrell <dcantrell@redhat.com>
Red Hat, Inc. | Boston, MA | EST5EDT