Autoreconf vs already configured source

Development
1

I’ve just opened a PR to update the remake package cf https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/119737. The previous maintainer was using the sources from the release assets which were already configured (the ./configure file was already generated). So I thought that it would be better to compile directly from the “raw” sources and do the autoreconf step in nix.

It turns out that this step requires to download a few files from none stable links. I made it work with a new fetcher. The autoreconfHook step works and the sources build fine.

But the question remains : should we use preconfigured sources or should we always privilege autoreconfiguring in nix ?

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I personally would prefer building “closest to source”, to make it easy to patch and customize. But in https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/119737 upstream is doing something that is really non-reproducible when building from the git source tree, so I’d lean towards using the released tarballs in that case. Ref. https://github.com/rocky/remake/issues/46#issuecomment-532922782

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