FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Hans de Goede]

<ignore previous nonsense reply I accidentially did ctrl+enter instead of just
  enter>

Brian Pepple wrote:
> I received the following proposal from Karsten Hopp, which he would like
> FESCo to make a decision on during this week's meeting (2008-05-08).
> I'm forwarding it to the list, so that people can weigh-in on it.
> 
> ---
> 
> We are currently shipping an insane number of compatibility autofoo
> packages which haven't seen any upstream maintenance for many years:
> 
> autoconf213-2.13-18.fc8.noarch.rpm   (9 years)
> automake14-1.4p6-15.fc7.noarch.rpm   (6 years)
> automake15-1.5-23.noarch.rpm         (7 years)
> automake16-1.6.3-14.noarch.rpm       (6 years)
> automake17-1.7.9-11.noarch.rpm       (4 1/2 years)
> 
> PROPOSAL: I'd like to keep just the following packages and would like to
> have release engineering to block the older packages from Rawhide:
> autoconf-2.61-10.fc9.noarch.rpm
> automake-1.10.1-2.noarch.rpm
>

This gets a big +1 from me

> This is the complete list of rawhide packages requiring those ancient
> autofoo packages, it is rather short and it should be doable to convert
> those packages to current autofoo:
> 
> automake17 cegui-0.5.0b-7.fc9.src.rpm

Thats mine now a days, but I have no problem with fixing this.

> They also
> should make sure if it is really necessary to run p.e. automake at all
> during the build process.
> 

Yes, quite often when adding a simple -lfoo or something like that its quite 
easy to patch both the .ac / .am file as the generated files, which is often 
better as regenerating autoxxx generated files on old unmaintained .ac / .am 
files can often (silently) introduce all kind of interesting (new) bugs.

So its really much better to try and not regenerate autoxxx files during the 
build ever. There is a reason why these files are part of the tarbal and not 
regenerated automatically during a ./configure && make even when the tools to 
regenerate them are present.

Regards,

Hans