Calling autoconf in a spec.

[Kevin Kofler]

Nils Philippsen wrote:
> I'd really love to be able to re-run current auto-tools on old
> Makefile.am/configure.{in,ac} files and the results to work in all
> cases, but right now that seems utopian to me.

Yet the competition ( http://www.cmake.org/ ) manages that very thing just 
fine…

The whole Policies feature:
http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/cmake-2-8-docs.html#section_Policies
is explicitly designed to support perfect bug-for-bug compatibility with 
CMakeLists.txt files written for older versions of CMake, while 
fixing/improving things for newer CMakeLists.txt files (with a newer minimum 
required version of CMake; the default for all the policies is to match the 
behavior of the CMakeLists.txt's minimum required CMake version, this can be 
overridden per policy).

That's how things work when upstream actually cares about backwards 
compatibility.

        Kevin Kofler