while finally finding my time to update the frei0r Debian package, i
discovered a slight weirdness in the release-files for frei0r:

for whatever reasons, the frei0r-plugins-1.5.0.tar.gz as shipped on [1]
contains different files than the "v1.5" tags on github/dyne.
it also contains different files than the "v1.5-tarball" tag.


now obviously (and for good reasons) the tarball contains all the
autotools generated stuff, which is not present in the repo.

however:

the tarball does *not* contain all the generated autotool files
(notably, Makefile.in is missing), thus requiring the user to run
autogen.sh/autoreconf even on the release-tarball (so what's the point
of having a release-tarball that differs from the repo?)

the tarball goes to great lenghts to actually *remove* files required
for the autotools.
for reasons unknown to me, the files README, ChangeLog, TODO & AUTHORS
have been renamed to README.txt, ChangeLog.txt, TODO.txt & AUTHORS.txt.
not so cool as these files are
a) required by a GNU-compatible automake project (and the "foreign"
option is missing from both configure.ac and Makefile.am)
b) explicitely required by the Makefile.am (as they are listed in
docs_DATA). so fixing a) to survive 'autogen.sh' will still fail to
build with a similar error...

this results in an incompilable tarball (at least with autotools).

the fun is, that everything *works* in the repository.
(mostly because the README is called README rather than README.txt)

so i wonder why the autotools have been deliberately broken for the
release tarball.

maybe nobody uses autotools (but the Debian packaging guys). that would
explain why nobody complained so far.
but then, please just remove the autotools build system entirely (rather
than manually make sure that it won't work)


sorry if this comes harsh, but i've spent too much time with this issue.

gfmasrd
IOhannes

[1] https://releases.dyne.org/frei0r/releases/