an update to automake-1.11?

[Kevin Kofler]

Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> In my last message, rather than speculate I posted logs from a randomly
> chosen project, openldap, that showed that to be not the case.

That's one project. It doesn't prove any sort of a general trend.

> I invite you to find a counterexample, but I regret to inform you, finding
> one won't be easy.

I already mentioned a bunch of counterexamples (all the stuff I worked on 
with Romain Liévin: tfdocgen, libticables2, libticonv, libtifiles2, 
libticalcs2, TiLP 2, TiEmu, TiLP GFM, TiEmu SkinEdit etc.).

> Well, I just showed that routine changes to configure.ac occur far more
> often than updated to autoconf.

You just found one project which is extremely reluctant to upgrade their 
autoconf (and it's one of those projects still using the deprecated 
"configure.in" file name, that says pretty much everything).

> Conclusion: given a patch to configure.ac, and a patch to configure, an
> update to autotools is far likely to require more work to maintain the
> configure patch, while an update to configure.ac will likely require more
> woth main the configure.ac. And, this is the most likely outcome given, as
> I pointed out in openldap's case, which you would like to ignore, happens
> far more often than autotools update.

I'm ignoring your example because it's one example against 9+ examples from 
me, plus Adam Jackson's packaging experiences which started this subthread. 
You just found the exception.

> Case closed.

No, your argumentation is based on false premises.

        Kevin Kofler