'dpkg-source --commit' should always exclude changes made by dh_autoreconf unless explicitly told to include them.

Martin-Éric

Hi!

The files affected by dh_autoreconf operation are dynamic, and not even
dh_autoreconf knows about them beforehand. It currently tracks the state
of the files before and after execution to be able to check what changed.

Adding support for this in dpkg-source would imply having to use
internal files and implementation details from dh_autoreconf, which
seems wrong.

If this needs to be supported, then dh_autoreconf could instead temporarily
add the files to ignore into debian/source/local-options (and then
perhaps clean that up after restoring the state?). Of course that would
mean that such file being tracked in a VCS could end up being committed, but
that does not seem so bad either, the main problem being that the list
might changed depending on the autotools version installed.



If the VCS concerns from the above example implementation would be
considered unacceptable, we could maybe add some interface for dpkg-source
to use, for ephemeral ignores (just within the worktree), although I'm not
sure how that would look like. And then make that new interface a
blocker for this report.

Thanks,
Guillem

ti 21.7.2026 klo 13.35 Guillem Jover (guillem@debian.org) kirjoitti:

A simpler approach would be to tell dh_autoreconf to restore dynamic
files before dpkg-source commits other changes to a patch.

Martin-Éric