FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Stepan Kasal]

Hi,

On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 06:53:59PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 12:33 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> > Or if autotools maintainers would stop changing the interface so 
> > freaking often, this wouldn't be a problem either....
> Apparently you don't have much clues about the autotools.
> 
> They did not change the "interface so often".
> 
> There has been one big interface change: It occurred between
> autoconf-2.13 and autoconf-2.50 - Many years ago.

well, there was also the change in Automake 1.4 -> 1.5, which
happened after that, and then the "stabilization period" for "new"
automake until, say, 1.8.

So it is about 7 years ago since the last interface change and
we can say that Autotools are really stable and mature for at least 4
years.

What _is_ the problem, is that many projects use an undocumented
internals, instead of requesting an enhancement.
And _that_ kind of hacks break very easily with a new release.

Stepan