FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Alan]

> I'm not sure I can go along with this.  I'm sure we'd all agree that
> there's no point in carrying old versions of various pieces of
> software for no reason, but we shouldn't drop them all just because
> they're not current.  Instead we should (periodically) evaluate why we
> have those in the distro and decide if we want to continue to have
> them.  So autoconf213 is needed for firefox development.  That's
> certainly a valid reason, and it should be documented somewhere (in
> the autoconf213 spec, maybe) so that we won't forget next year when
> someone again asks why we still have autoconf213 around.
>
> Perhaps we can port a few packages over to a recent automake and get
> rid of some of the old versions.  It certainly wouldn't be a bad
> thing.

I have a bit of a problem with this.

I build a fair amount of software that is not in the repository.  Some of
it requires crufty old versions of various toolkits.  Having those
toolkits go away makes it much harder to get this packages to run.  If I
have an older version that does compile, I can determine if it even works
at all.  (Which happens far too often for me. *cough* *cough* numerix
*cough*)

It is not just the things in the distro you need to worry about. It is
also the things that others may want to build using the distro.