Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes: > The design of autoconf is predicated on the idea that people who are > building the package are given a portable configure as part of the > source package, so there is no need to have good compatibility between > configure.in and various versions of autoconf.
> I don't understand why the current autoconf maintainers have lost sight > of this. Perhaps it's because they're actually the automake maintainers > who maybe never understood it. They've drastically improved the compatibility between Autoconf releases starting at around 2.59, so at this point unless you're using new features you very rarely run into any trouble with being unable to rebuild configure. Automake and Libtool are similarly much more solid than they used to be. I used to have a lot of qualms about regenerating the files because so many people used hacked versions or weird constructs that would be buggy in some versions of the autotools, but this problem really has largely gone away due to tons of hard work on the part of the Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool maintainers. I'm much more comfortable just regenerating the files with the latest versions now. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/878vwd4epu....@windlord.stanford.edu
