DH_AUTORECONF

Section: User Contributed Perl Documentation (1)
Updated: 2021-02-08
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NAME

dh_autoreconf - Call autoreconf -f -i and keep track of the changed files.

SYNOPSIS

dh_autoreconf [debhelper options] [-Xitem] [--mode=mode] [program -- params]

DESCRIPTION

dh_autoreconf is responsible for calling autoreconf and creating the files debian/autoreconf.before and debian/autoreconf.after which contain checksums of all files before/after the build. It is complemented by dh_autoreconf_clean which creates a list of all changed and added files and removes them.

Please note that dh_autoreconf can only be run once. Thus, if you need to run multiple commands, use a script or similar. An example is given in dh-autoreconf(7).

FILES

debian/autoreconf: This file can contain a list of directories. If present, dh_autoreconf will only scan the given directories for changes. If no special command is given to dh_autoreconf, it will also forward the directory list to autoreconf which causes it to be run only on those sub directories.

OPTIONS

-Xitem --exclude=item: Exclude files that contain ``item'' anywhere in their filename from being checked for changes. This means that those files won't be deleted by "dh_autoreconf_clean" even if there are changes. You may use this option multiple times to build up a list of things to exclude.
Starting with version 3, the directories of common version control systems such as cvs, git, hg, svn, and bzr are excluded automatically.
--mode=mode: Change the way in which modifications to files are detected. The default mode is md5 for using MD5 checksums, but there is also timesize for using the time of the last modification and the file size.
--as-needed: Enable support for -Wl,--as-needed in all ltmain.sh files identical to the one of the libtool package. This only works in the MD5 mode (the default one). The changes are reverted in dh_autoreconf_clean. You should not prevent LIBTOOLIZE from running with this, as it only works correctly with libtoolize running.
-Ddir --sourcedirectory=dir: Run everything in the source directory. Supported only in debhelper compat level 10 for backwards compatibility.
program -- params: Run the program given by program with the arguments given by params instead of autoreconf -f -i. If you need to run multiple commands, put them in a script and pass the script instead (or add a target to debian/rules).

ENVIRONMENT

For each tool executed by autoreconf(1), one can export a variable with the uppercase name of the tool to the specific program which shall be run, including true to prevent the tool in question from being run. The following example shows the beginning of a debian/rules for a package where automake 1.11 shall be run instead of the default automake version and libtoolize shall not be run:

    #!/usr/bin/make -f
    export AUTOMAKE = automake-1.11
    export LIBTOOLIZE = true

AUTHOR

Julian Andres Klode <jak@debian.org>