dear IOhannes,

I'm sorry if the issue you described in detail (thanks) took you long
time to debug. It is entirely my fault: when packaging tarball
releases I rename all text files without an extension to .txt in order
to make the generic audience able to open them with a click.

I understand how this practice may be breaking the Debian packaging,
while I wish that would be more flexible and keen to accomodate the
needs of a more generic audience. Meanwhile, if there are no
objections to it, I will stop adding the .txt extension.

About the autoconf issue, I'll also look into it and make sure that
autoreconf is run inside the tarball and all files are in place.

May I suggest then that you wait for the next release, which will also
include recently contributed fixes? Then all issues you raise should
be fixed, or if any will be left in place we can have an appointment
on IRC to straighten out details.

I hope this will suffice, many thanks for your patience!





On Wed, 19 Oct 2016, IOhannes m zmölnig wrote:

> 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/
>