Development Best Practices

• Do not patch generated files (e.g. configure, Makefile) when they will be regenerated from steps like do_configure (e.g. from configure.ac, Makefile.am). Is important the timestamps of the base files are newer than the generated files so the system works deterministically and it also ensures consistency in approach across the metadata. An exception would be where we don't regenerate the files (e.g. in gcc configure).