Should we encourage or require ports to use autoreconf?

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Mar 26, 2025, at 10:11 AM, Ryan Carsten Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>> 2) Patch the sources of 'configure' and rerun autoconf.  This is the conceptually cleanest approach, but it not only adds unnecessary build time but also adds the reproducibility/verifiability issue noted above.
> 
> This is what I am proposing we switch to. As I said, added build time is decreasing to negligibility as computers get faster. I'd rather our build machines spend a few more seconds on a build than spend an hour of my time manually patching an old configure script.

I think encouraging this is reasonable (while still letting maintainers choose to just patch configure if they feel like it's worth their time to do that/update it for new releases instead).

-- 
Daniel J. Luke