Patching configure - Or Not

[Anders F Björklund]

Michael Franz wrote:

> I need to change the way configure works for a port.  Is it better  
> to patch configure or change the underlying files and regenerate  
> configure?  In this case I have a change to acinclude.m4.  To get  
> everything updated I need to run aclocal, automake and autoconf.
>
> Since I cannot figure out how to get aclocal, automake and autoconf  
> to run in the pre-configure step I have to patch configure.  Is  
> this a good idea?

If you want to patch something simple, then the quick-and-dirty  
approach is to patch *both*.
This makes it easy to use, but also easier to separate when sending  
the patch upstream...

There's plenty of examples of ports doing it this way in the current  
tree, for instance ?

Just make sure that the "configure" has a later timestamp than the  
"configure.ac" etc does.
Otherwise configure will notice, and try to regenerate itself when  
invoked (and might fail)

i.e. patch "configure.ac" (or configure.in or .m4) first in the file,  
and "configure" after

--anders