dpatch on Makefile.in?

[Tollef Fog Heen]

* Martin Pitt 

| Because it is evil, error prone, and not robust. Such packages are
| much more likely to fail to build because of newer autotools versions,
| they add a build dependency to the autotools files, take longer to
| build and when cleaning them and building the source package they blow
| up the package diff.gz massively.

This is a matter of discussion.  I think running auto* as part of the
build process is fine as long as you watch your build-depends.  Apart
from the ancient and buggy automake 1.4, using a newer or older
automake is generally fine.

Also, if you don't test that regenerating the Makefile.in works with
current tools, what errors can you run into when you need to do that
to fix a security bug, for instance?

If you don't want to blow up the size of the .diff.gz, just run make
distclean as part of the debian/rules clean target.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-