Re: [Cooker] Re: [Maintainers] A plan for automake

[Guillaume Rousse]

Frederic Crozat wrote:
>>>To know which version to use is very simple : just look at Makefile.in, it
>>>states which version of automake was used by upstream authors. Use the
>>>same and everything is fine, no need to worry about anything else.
>>
>>That is a real point, as it concerns strategy. Your suggestion is indeed
>>the easiest and most immediate way. However, it's also what led to the
>>current situation: hardcoding the need for automake 1.6 because upstream
>>developper used it instead of at least testing with current stable
>>automake version, make us dependant from automake 1.6 forever. That's
>>why I find it discussable.
> 
> 
> And why is it a problem to use the same major version of automake as
> software authors,except the "but it's not the latest version" reason ? I
> haven't seen any rationale about that.
My rationales were mainly to not get stuck forever with old versions of
automake, the same way we prefer avoiding maintaining old gcc versions.
Also, I wanted to reduce the number of additional packages neeeded for
backporting, when hardcoded version was not available in previous
release, whereas unversioned use was OK.

I realize now your strategy is safer, as it brings more garanties the
package will still build in the future, at a relatively low maintainance
overhead. You got the point. Does anyone else agree than always
hardcoding exact version of autotools used is better ? Or are they
exceptions ? In other term, can we make it a general policy ?

If so, we should rather revert previous 1.8 and 1.9 automake branches
merge. And maybe still clean up unversioned
binaries/alternatives/virtual packages in our automake packages.

>>Anyway, such kind of explanations would be welcome on the wiki to avoid
>>cargo cult syndrom of maintainers blindly copying code they don't
>>understand from spec to spec.
> 
> 
> Done on wiki now.
Thanks. I'll try to merge all the warious pieces of informations about
autotools when I'll have some free time.