Re: patching Makefile.am: autoreconf or more patches?

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2019-10-11 at 16:56 BST, Edgar Fuß wrote:

> While working on collectd (pkgsrc-ing more plugins) I noticed that 
> Makefile.common contains a pre-configure target running autoreconf, 
> presumably because there's a patch to Makefile.ac.
> 
> Since running autoreconf is rather expensive, wouldn't it be prefrerrable 
> to include patches for the generated files (whatever they are) instead?
> Or is this deemed to error-prone in case the patch to Makefile.ac is 
> altered?

It depends on the complexity of the patch.  Patching the generated
files is preferable and should be used for the majority of cases, but
occasionally a large number of changes are required to multiple files,
and in those cases it's simpler to patch a few lines of m4 and
regenerate, especially when it comes to updating the package.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com