FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 07:09 -0700, Wes Hardaker wrote:
> >>>>> On Mon, 5 May 2008 21:50:30 -0600, "Jerry James" <loganjerry at gmail.com> said:
> 
> JJ> Actually, we did update it on the 21.5 (beta) branch quite awhile ago.
> JJ> It's true that the 21.4 (stable) branch has never been updated,
> JJ> though.
> 
> In second thought, that really brings up one of my primary points:
> People don't like upgrading autoconf version usage on old branches
> because it brings about unknown effects a lot of the time. IE, it's
> simply not safe to do without heavy understanding and testing. 
Correct - but ... ask yourself ... If wanting to be pedantic, this
applies to any tool. Any tool upgrade/change may silently break your
once "functional code" without any warning.

The autotools actually aren't substantially different wrt. this.

>  It's
> like adding a feature; you don't do it on stable releases because it
> can't be trusted.
Correct ... That's one reason why this job should be left to upstreams
and not to distributions or casual packagers.

> And thus, if we want developers to use fedora we should distribute
> multiple versions of the development tools when version updates have
> potentially large ramifications.
If you are serious about this, Fedora will have to ship alternatives for
all development tools. The alternative is to push upstreams to "release
often, release early" and to keep the pace with tool development.

It's what Fedora does otherwise, e.g. wrt. GCC, python, perl, gtk, X11,
etc.

Ralf