FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Karsten Hopp]

Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 23:43 -0400, Casey Dahlin wrote:
>>> The gain is we decide what to keep and what not to keep based on who 
>>> actually is willing to fight to keep it around rather than whoever 
>>> feels like complaining on devel list. Its a corollary to "its easier 
>>> to apologize than to ask permission," the people who notice the 
>>> change are a tiny and far more important subset than the people who 
>>> will complain ahead of time.
>>
>> It doesn't account for the developers who will have failures, notice we
>> don't package a version of autoconf anymore and say "Screw that" and
>> move to some other development platform which does support what they
>> need.
>>
>>
> 
> My $.02 worth of thoughts:
> 
> One could imagine a policy in which new packages using these tools would 
> not be accepted per-se, while the tools would still be available, 
> packaged, for those other packages and developers that need it.
> 
> Does such, or something similar, make sense?
> 

Such a policy would be ok with me. The whole intention for this proposal was
to disencourage usage of the old tools, not to force maintainers to rewrite their
configure scripts immediately or use another distribution.
Nonetheless maintainers of forementioned packages should check if it is
necessary to run autofoo during the build. Most of the times it isn't and if I
remember correctly even I am guilty of doing this due to laziness and/or time
constraints.

     Karsten