FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Christopher Aillon]

On 05/05/2008 10:59 AM, Brian Pepple wrote:
> I received the following proposal from Karsten Hopp, which he would like
> FESCo to make a decision on during this week's meeting (2008-05-08).
> I'm forwarding it to the list, so that people can weigh-in on it.
> 
> ---
> 
> We are currently shipping an insane number of compatibility autofoo
> packages which haven't seen any upstream maintenance for many years:
> 
> autoconf213-2.13-18.fc8.noarch.rpm   (9 years)
> automake14-1.4p6-15.fc7.noarch.rpm   (6 years)
> automake15-1.5-23.noarch.rpm         (7 years)
> automake16-1.6.3-14.noarch.rpm       (6 years)
> automake17-1.7.9-11.noarch.rpm       (4 1/2 years)
> 
> PROPOSAL: I'd like to keep just the following packages and would like to
> have release engineering to block the older packages from Rawhide:
> autoconf-2.61-10.fc9.noarch.rpm
> automake-1.10.1-2.noarch.rpm
> 
> This is the complete list of rawhide packages requiring those ancient
> autofoo packages, it is rather short and it should be doable to convert
> those packages to current autofoo:

This is only the complete list of packages that currently BuildRequire 
it in their spec.  Not the packages that ever BuildRequire them.

The entire mozilla stack requires autoconf213 for configure.in hacking. 
    See bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104642

Unless someone steps up and does the work to get this upstream properly, 
I am afraid I, along with some of the mozilla upstream developers, will 
no longer be able to use rawhide if we drop autoconf213 from it.