FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Christopher Aillon]

On 05/08/2008 12:57 AM, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 14:29 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
>> Firefox will probably take some effort :-)
>>
>> If someone with the knowledge and ambition wants to do the work, I will 
>> help as best I can.  The bug once again is 
>> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104642
> 
> Has there been any talk of switching Firefox to cmake? cmake is actually
> cross platform...

I really don't think upstream has any real objections to moving to a 
more modern system, be it new autotools, or a different system 
altogether PROVIDED THEIR REQUIREMENTS ARE MET.  The big requirement 
that nobody has solved yet is "must work in every case and on every 
platform it does now".  I don't know whether cmake is as portable as 
gmake is, but you're free to discuss that with them.

But honestly, talking about which system to upgrade to is not really 
that useful.  The biggest problem is that everybody is all talk and 
nobody is really stepping up to do the work.  If you want to see change, 
then do it.  File an upstream bug with a patch, and be aware that you 
should really be prepared to regenerate it frequently as configure.in 
and various Makefile.in are some of the more frequently modified files 
in the mozilla tree, and it is likely that by the time all issues are 
solved, you will have had to regenerate the patch several times.