FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

Wes Hardaker wjhns174 at hardakers.net
Tue May 6 00:17:41 UTC 2008


>>>>> On Mon, 05 May 2008 10:59:08 -0400, Brian Pepple <bpepple at fedoraproject.org> said:

BP> PROPOSAL: I'd like to keep just the following packages and would like to
BP> have release engineering to block the older packages from Rawhide:
BP> autoconf-2.61-10.fc9.noarch.rpm
BP> automake-1.10.1-2.noarch.rpm

I don't think this is helpful to developers.  Those packages aren't just
used by Fedora packaging developers.  They're used by anyone anywhere
who needs to maintain a build system.  Different software components
require older versions of autoconf to successfully work on.  Sad, but
very true.  I have multiple installations of autoconf in place and I use
them all.  Not because I want to, but because the base package I'm
working on doesn't work with newer versions (this is particularly true
from autoconf < 2.5 to anything > 2.5 and also true for 2.58 > 2.59 or
beyond).  Fixing a configure.in file to make it portable is often a ton
of work for a big package.  If it wasn't, XEmacs would have updated it's
configure.in file from 2.13 to something more recent a long long time
ago ;-)
-- 
"In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap,
 and much more difficult to find."  -- Terry Pratchett




More information about the devel mailing list