jbailey | AM_MAINTAINER_MODE - A decent solution

I don't really know why I found myself looking at the gitweb for automake just now, but I noticed that they've finally committed something I've wanted for a bit (but was, of course, too lazy to code myself)[0]

AM_MAINTAINER_MODE was the subject of huge debate when it first came out. It's the bit that can set itself so that the autotools scripts won't get regenerated even if the source files for those have been touched.

The problem is that by default, that's the wrong thing to do. A developer with the source (which I assume anyone with the source is. Otherwise their distro is probably handling all their compilation needs) *wants* those updates to happen automagically. In a distro, however, it's occasionally necessary to patch the autoconf bits, which means that you're trusting the installed autoconf on either the builder or your machine to consistently do the right thing in an automated fashion. And hopefully leave you with a readable debdiff in the end.

I'm hoping that AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([disabled]) becomes a standard thing to do with autoconf-based packages.

[0] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=automake.git;a=commit;h=861c19856121d8e875e30268dee6033ded6fc7ae