On Sun, 20 Dec 2020 at 16:46, Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> wrote:

> This patch is already in Gnulib since 2020-12-09. But when people
> run 'autoreconf' on an existing released tarball, they are effectively
> combining an older Gnulib with a newest Autoconf.
>
> Why do people do that? The point of tarballs is that you can run
> './configure' right away.
>
> If people want to modify the build infrastructure, it would often be
> more reasonable to start off the git repository of the package (possibly
> from a specific release tag or release branch).


Because it’s not uncommon to need newer config.status, or updated m4 files,
or to patch Makefile.am or configure.ac.

Ross

>