Subject: Re: bug#13378: Backward-compatibility in the autotools

From: Peter Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:38:07 +1000

On 01/12/2013 04:45 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>> As a rule of thumb on when to remove a macro - I would personally like
>> >  being able to write a configure script that works on both RHEL 5 (or
>> >  CentOS 5) (autoconf 2.59, automake 1.9.6) as well as rawhide (eventually
>> >  automake 1.14 and beyond), for as long as RHEL 5 remains a viable
>> >  Enterprise-level distro.
>> >
> I'm quite unconvinced of the value in trying to support this.  Developers
> should just keep their tool reasonably up-to date IMHO; if they can't
> do so through their package manager, they should do so by installing
> from source.
Keeping autotools might be trivial in one-man-projects, but imposing 
that kind of requirement in larger teams is just causing head ache and 
friction, as most members wouldn't barely know what autotools are and 
even less interested in spending any time on upgrading tools that should 
just work under then hood.

Cheers,
Peter