From #xfce4-dev on FreeNode (2011-12-27): <m8t> if you have a tarball without autogen.sh it's a bug that needs to be reported The release tarball for parole-0.2.0.6 does not ship the autogen.sh script. When a packager needs patch it (to work around bug #6244) you need regen the configure.ac, configure and automake. Doing so without the autogen.sh is a pain due to this "brilliant" way of generating scripts that generate scripts that generates scripts that generates the program.
This is not true. None of the core tarballs includes autogen.sh and it's not needed either. autoreconf works just fine if you tell it where the xdt m4 files are (usually /usr/share/xfce4/dev-tools/m4macros).
Hello, My bad (don't always trust what I say), that's not a bug, because you need autogen.sh when you clone the source from git and not from a tarball. With the tarball you depend on one revision for which the configure script is entirely functional. Indeed patching the configure script is "more annoying", bug that's part of the packagers job, right? Just look at how other packagers are doing it within RPM or DEB packages. And you can always try to run xdt-autogen (which is what basically the autogen.sh is hiding), or insert your own copy of autogen.sh, to "manually" patch the files for you. Thank your for your report nonetheless. Regards, Mike