[Debian-science-sagemath] [sage-devel] Upcoming Debian freeze

[E. Madison Bray]

On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 10:02 AM Jeroen Demeyer <J.Demeyer at ugent.be> wrote:
>
> On 2019-01-08 08:50, Jerome BENOIT wrote:
> > And the argument can be easily reverted: do not use autotools in the set up !
>
> No. autoconf (that's the only part of autotools that I use) is perfectly
> suited to solve the problems that I need to solve in cysignals. It
> solves the problem of detecting various headers and functions. I
> wouldn't know how to do that otherwise.
>
> The main problem seems to be that merely having a "./configure" script
> creates false expectations. I am actually wondering whether I should
> rename "./configure" to something else just to avoid that confusion.

This is why I suggested moving it out of the top-level directory, as
that might also reduce confusion.

However, I can also see some of the problems Jerome is having (see
e.g. the patch to setup.py for Debian:
https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/modules/cysignals/blob/master/debian/patches/upstream-autotoolization_pytoolization-harden-build_directory.patch)

The fact remains that Cysignals' configure script *does* take some
optional arguments which are useful, such as --with(out)-pari.

Perhaps it would require a bit less hackery if the custom build
command in the setup.py also added an option to pass some flags to the
configure script.