Hello,
when building a official Debian package for rtrackalyer, our build farm works in a directory named after the Debian package, r-bioc-rtracklayer. This fails because rtracklayer's configure file contains a command that check for the presence of a directory or a file called rtracklayer in the current or parent directory. This command is present because in configure.ac, the macro AC_INIT is used with a single parameter, "rtracklayer". Here is an extract from the autoconf manual, documenting that this use is obsolete.
— Macro: AC_INIT (unique-file-in-source-dir)
Formerly AC_INIT used to have a single argument, and was equivalent to:
AC_INIT
AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR(unique-file-in-source-dir)
See AC_INIT and AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR.
Indeed, replacing AC_INIT("rtracklayer") with just AC_INIT or AC_INIT(rtracklayer, 1.32.0) and running autoreconf -f removes the line ac_unique_file=""rtracklayer"" in the configure script.
If this behaviour is not necessary on Bioconductor's side, would it be possible to adjust the configure file in the next release ? While it is trivial for us to create a dummy rtracklayer file in the build directory, we prefer when our packaged R modules are running pure boilerplate build scripts.
Cheers,
-- Charles Plessy, Debian Med packaging team.
