Automake 1.9 breakage

Colin Walters walters at redhat.com
Mon Aug 2 15:27:56 UTC 2004


On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 10:34 -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 12:40:34AM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > A package should *always* call a specific version of automake.  If a
> > package directly invokes "automake", that's a bug.  It should instead
> > call automake-1.8, automake-1.4, whatever is known to work.
> 
> Most don't bother. Nor can you really blame the package authors since
> most of them wrote their configuration stuff without realising a bunch
> of nutters would start issuing a zillion differently incompatible autoconf
> tool sets with more new syntax bugs than perl

Sure...I am holding out hope that things will stabilize eventually.  So
far there have been good reasons for bumping the automake major
versions, but at some point I hope it'll reach a point where they can
make changes without breaking backwards compatibility.

> > The automake binaries are versioned for a reason - so installing a new
> > version doesn't break builds.  Patches to move to a new version should
> > be upstream, since they are more likely to be familiar with their build
> > system and the effects of new automake versions on their packages.
> 
> So you want to end up in the state where CD #2 is "autoconfs"  8) ?

It's not that bad.  My automake-1.8 package is a megabyte.  And as
packages gradually migrate to newer versions, we shouldn't have a
problem.
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