FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 01:08:23PM +0200, Karsten Hopp wrote:

> should help upstream to move to more recent autofoo. 

...

> But I still think a guideline that
> new packages should be checked if they can easily ported to current autofoo before they
> get accepted would help us und upstream in the longer term. Please note that I don't insist
> on having them ported, if it is too complicated to port it should still get accepted.
> But not every package has that many special cases and hacks as the firefox package, most
> should be portable without too much affort and I'm sure most upstream maintainers would be
> glad to get patches for the autofoo stuff.

I don't think this should be in guidelines or enforced in any
way. These are more like development best practices for upstream. Fedora
contributors can help upstream in that direction, but they can also help
in any other direction, porting to newer autotools may not be worth the
time used. Lets let the packagers decide for themselves where they
should invest their time devoted to helping upstream.

We could do a page in the wiki for the best practices for upstream that
helps packaging (like you said, there is here using recent autotool
versions, but there is also using pkgconfig, having CFLAGS easily
overriden by the user, changing sonames for backward incompatible ABI 
library releases, but only for ABI incompatible changes, allowing for 
staged install easily, if possible using DESTDIR...).

--
Pat