Automake 1.9 breakage

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 11:03, Pawel Salek wrote:
> On 08/02/2004 06:40:34 AM, Colin Walters wrote:
> > On Sun, 2004-08-01 at 08:57 -0700, Steve G wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > The new automake 1.9 breaks several packages.
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> What if a package is known to work with all released automake versions: 
> Should it still hardcode one of them? I have a feeling it it is not a  
> good idea: will it not force users to have all possible versions of  
> automake installed just in case?

Well, the question is not whether it is known to work with all
released versions of automake, the question is whether it will
work with all unreleased versions of automake...

Until the automake maintainers make a commitment to backwards
compatibility, there is no way you can know that. (I think
there is some convergence ... things are changing less now than
they used to. But there still is no commitment to not breaking
things at all.)

I generally don't see a point in running a newer version of 
automake than the maintainer of the package has tested it with. The
packages isn't going to take advantage of features of the newer
automake.

Preference:

 - Don't run automake at all. It's only necessary if some patch
   modifies the Makefile.am's in the package. (If you do have
   to run automake put a comment by the invocation indicating
   which patch is the culprit.)

 - Run the version of automake that the distributed package uses
   as automake-1.8 or whatever. 

 - Run the newest version of automake in the distribution, test,
   and hardcode that into the specfile as automake-1.8 or whatever.

Regards,
						Owen

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