FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Toshio Kuratomi]

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?
> 
No.

The packager should not have to use the autotools normally.  So during 
package review, what version of autotools is necessary might not come 
up.  Only when a problem is discovered that requires changing the 
configure.in/ac or Makefile.am will the version of autotools start 
mattering to the packager.

-Toshio