FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Karsten Hopp]

Christopher Aillon schrieb:
> On 05/09/2008 01:10 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>> If we really and truly want to get upstreams off of older versions of 
>> autoconf/automake, we need to introduce it into our toolchain and have 
>> every package that uses autotools invoke the current autoconf/automake 
>> in the build.  This will bring errors to the surface so we can fix 
>> them and submit the changes upstream.
> 
> Toshio, this thread is dead.
> 
> I already brought one application that doesn't build with current 
> autotools to the surface: Firefox.  (Well, plus Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, 
> etc).  Yet, as popular as Firefox is, I don't see anyone fixing it. I've 
> been asking multiple times on this thread for people that care about 
> this issue to fix it.  There have been no takers as of yet.
> 
> That should speak volumes about how important this really is.
> 


I had a look at the Firefox build environment and the patch from Enrico Weigelt you've
pointed at. The main problem here isn't porting the stuff to current autofoo but to make
sure that Firefox still builds on every supported platform and every combination of
autoconf / automake versions. Heavy stuff indeed and lots of testing required ,-(
I can now understand why I seem to have found a sore point and got you so agitated,
I'm sorry about that.


   Karsten