FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 17:24 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:

>  > The packager should not have to use the autotools normally.
> 
> I "never" *cough* the two packages that I'm upstream for *cough* ship 
> any autofoo output files, only autofoo input files; it's excluded from 
> the source tree and excluded in tarballs... Should I reconsider this?
Yes. You improperly using the autotools.

In case you are using automake, you should cut your tarballs using "make
dist". Such tarballs normally include the generated files.

>  Is it gonna give trouble at some point?
Depends.

If your autotool-input files are properly written, compliant to modern
autotools syntax, and being tested with modern autotools by upstream
(i.e. you) this should not impose much problems to packagers/casual
installers on mainstream platforms (such as Fedora).

If not, upstream (i.e. you) will likely be facing problems sooner or
later, esp. on "more exotic platforms" (MacOSX, Cygwin, MinGW, Solaris,
HPUX, ...).

Ralf