an update to automake-1.11?

[Mark McLoughlin]

Hi Jim,

On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 23:49 +0200, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 12:50 +0200, Ondřej Vašík wrote:
> >> Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> >> > On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 09:02 +0200, Ondřej Vašík wrote:
> >> > > Owen Taylor wrote:
> >> > > > I was rather surprised to see:
> >> > > >
> >> > > >  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F9/FEDORA-2009-6661
> >> > > >  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F10/FEDORA-2009-6076
> >> > > >  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F11/FEDORA-2009-6370
> >> > > >
> >> > > > Where the automake was upgraded to 1.11 for F9, F10, and F11.
> >> > >
> >> > > Upgrade on F-11 (and F-10) was requested because there are some projects
> >> > > (like gnulib/coreutils) which really need automake 1.11 for build in
> >> > > latest stable versions.
> >> >
> >> > Is there a bug report with details of this gnulib/coreutils request?
> >>
> >> Not really, it was just direct irl/irc/mail communication with
> >> automake/autoconf fedora maintainers&comaintainers. First request was
> >> only about 1.10b in rawhide (after f-12 split) - as I needed at least
> >> 1.10b to build coreutils-7.4 there (otherwise only with an ugly hack).
> >
> > Okay, but what exactly are we talking about here? What does gnulib or
> > coreutils need that 1.10 doesn't have?
> 
> Hi Mark,
> 
> I think it's great that automake-1.11 made it into F11 and F10.
> Even for F9, it's seems worthwhile.
> 
> The features in automake-1.11 that I've found worthwhile
> (in addition to 3 years worth of improved robustness,
> portability and performance, fewer bugs, etc.)
> are enabled by these two lines from coreutils' configure.ac:
> 
>   AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.11 dist-xz color-tests parallel-tests])
>   AM_SILENT_RULES([yes])

Thanks for the details, that's exactly the kind of information I was
trying to squeeze out of this discussion :-)

IMHO, if this had been in a bug report and referenced in the update
description, this discussion would purely be about whether it makes
sense to do this in F-9 (and F-10, maybe).

The issue here is weighing up the benefit of a 1.11 update to developers
using F-9 and F-10 versus the risk of breaking existing working builds.
It sounds automake has improved its level of compatibility between
releases, so the risk is relatively low. Even still, I'd be inclined to
say that developers who want 0.11 should install it themselves or update
to F-11.

> > A rebase of an important package in three stable releases, which is
> > expected to break rebuilds of some packages, should surely have more
> > justification than an empty update description, no associated bugzilla
> > and claims that Jim Meyering needs some unspecified new features.
> 
> I've been lamenting the 3-year-old version of automake in Fedora for
> years,

This "3 year old" issue is upstream's fault for taking that long to ship
a new release. 0.11 is 6 weeks old, so Fedora hadn't much choice in the
matter.

The timing vis-a-vis F-11 looks like it was unfortunate. Could we have
included a 0.10b in F-11 GA and update to 0.11 in an update? That would
have given the new code more Fedora testing.

Thanks again,
Mark.