On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 02:05:57PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
I was rather surprised to see:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F9/FEDORA-2009-6661
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F10/FEDORA-2009-6076
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F11/FEDORA-2009-6370
Where the automake was upgraded to 1.11 for F9, F10, and F11.
In general automake hasn't had a very good track record of compatibility
between 1.x and 1.y, though this has been getting better recently.
I don't see any specific mentions of incompatible changes in a quick
scan of:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2009-05/msg00093.html
But it is also a pretty long release announcement so it wouldn't
surprise me if there were some subtle incompatibilities.
The only breakage I'm actually aware of in the gnome-common package;
gnome-common-2.26 and earlier doesn't know that automake-1.11 is
a valid replacement when automake-1.10 is asked for.
So, we definitely need to release an update for gnome-common, or people
aren't going to be able to do GNOME development on F11.
But is this the type of upgrade that makes sense in general? It seems to
me that we should be very conservative in upgrading build tools,
especially in "maintenance mode" distributions like F9 and F10.
This is seriously dubious for F9, since if it causes a problem there
is next to no time in which to fix it before F9 updates are turned
off. In general I struggle to believe that there is a compelling
need to rebase automake versions in our stable releases.
Daniel
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