Hi Jim, On 28 Jan 2012, at 16:28, Jim Meyering wrote: > Gary V. Vaughan wrote: >> I'm wondering what purpose AC_PREREQ (etc) really >> serves if you're not using them to encode the versions of the autotools that >> are >> required to bootstrap a package in the way expected by the maintainers. > > It permits one to build the package unmodified on systems for which > the latest version of autoconf will never be available. > This is a big for e.g., libvirt.
That's a good point. So, will users of libvirt (when using compatible older autotools releases) want to be able to run bootstrap? If so, then my implementation in saner bootstrap is correct, and keeping the paragraph in README-release we're discussing is correct too... but I need to revise my thinking about AC_PREREQ and friends a little, and not misuse them to name latest stable releases. And also make a point of testing old versions of autotools to reaffirm the correctnesss of AC_PREREQ (etc), which is something I stopped doing a while ago as it consumes a lot of time, for (what I then thought) was little tangible gain. If not, then $buildreq can be used to manually specify latest stable releases of autotools, since libvirt rebootstrappers will be running the tools alone (e.g. auto- reconf rather than bootstrap), and AC_PREREQ can continue to specify minimum compatible version numbers. Cheers, -- Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)
