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

[Roland Illig <roland.illig%gmx.de@localhost>]

Am 11.10.2019 um 18:01 schrieb Jonathan Perkin:
> * 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?
>
> Patching the generated files is preferable [...]
I disagree. The preferred method is to patch the original file and then
immediately report it upstream. Upstream will prefer a patch to the
original file over the generated file.

After that, add a note in the patch file where you reported it upstream.
To see the full reasoning, run "pkglint -e" in a package with patches.