Re: Michael Paquier
> This one comes down to Debian that patches autoconf with its own set
> of options, requiring a new ./configure in the tree, right?
Yes, mostly. Since autoconf had not seen a new release for so long,
everyone started to patch it, and one of the things that Debian and
others added was --runstatedir=DIR. The toolchain is also using it,
it's part of the default set of options used by dh_auto_configure.
In parallel, the standard debhelper toolchain also started to run
autoreconf by default, so instead of telling dh_auto_configure to omit
--runstatedir, it was really easier to patch configure.ac to remove
the autoconf 2.69 check.
Two of the other patches are touching configure(.ac) anyway to tweak
compiler flags (reproducibility, aarch64 tweaks).
Christoph