an update to automake-1.11?

[Sam Varshavchik]

Kevin Kofler writes:

> Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>> Which, as I pointed out, is still the case if you were to patch
>> configure.ac instead.
>> 
>> But, go ahead and ignore this inconvenient fact, too.
> 
> As I explained (and you ignored), configure.ac tends to change a lot less 
> between upstream releases, especially with a lot fewer irrelevant changes 

This may come as a shock to some, but configure does not often change unless 
configure.ac changes too.

So, I'm not sure what does the frequency of changes to configure.ac has to 
do with anything.

> like line number changes or changes in aclocal snippets (because upstream 
> WILL regenerate the file, not surgically edit it!), so it's a lot less 
> likely to produce fuzz.

99% of the time when configure changes, it's due to changes in configure.ac.

If someone thinks that by patching configure.ac, instead of configure, one 
achieves tremendous savings in the frequency of needing to rebase one's 
patches, they're in a desperate need for a reality check.

Furthermore, changes to configure.ac will more likely to result in a more 
frequent manual rebases, where the corresponding changes in configure are 
far more likely to result in much simpler rebasing that's limited only to 
eliminating the fuzz. If one patches a line or two in configure.ac, then if 
the upstream futzes around with a neighboring line, the patch is going to 
get kicked out, and must be manually rebased. On the other hand, if a 
corresponding patch was against configure, instead, (and by that I mean a 
real patch, and not a patch to configure.ac followed by autoconf followed by 
a diff of the new configure against the old, I hate to explicitly say this, 
but some folks around here have a mental block on this subject, and can't 
wrap their brains around the concept of patching configure directly), the 
corresponding differences in configure would've ended up being hundred of 
lines apart, resulting in nothing more than some fuzz, that can be 
automatically updated.

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