On Thu, 2002-06-13 at 11:57, Joseph Carter wrote: Amusingly enough, I've had exactly the same problem over the last couple of weeks sorting this mess out on our build farms at work... > - automake1.5 should be dropped, 1.6 is compatible with 1.5 and is a > suitable bugfix release. Since not many packages build-dep on 1.5, > now's the time to recompile them with a versioned dep on 1.6. > I would be inclined to agree. I've not found anything that requires automake 1.5, the package either works with 1,4 or with 1.6. > - It'd probably be wise to replace automake with automake1.4 and have > automake be a virtual dependency. > Sounds additionally fair. > It is also quite broken for automake1.6 not to provide /usr/bin/automake. > since basically nobody uses the versioned scripts yet. This is not a > matter of what Debian packages should use, but rather what should be > available to our users. A low-priority alternative is most certainly > called for. An automake which fails to provide automake isn't much good > to anybody. I do not see how this is non-obvious, but it seems to need > saying, so there you have it: A package claiming to have a thing should > have it, preferably in a manner in which it is expected to be found. This > is especially true if that expectation is made by several thousand scripts > Debian did not write. > Agreed, both automake packages should include an "automake" executable, as both autoconf packages should include an "autoconf" one. I would be inclined for it to be an alternative pointing at automake1.6 by default, so anyone who can't get their package ported can still run "automake1.4" (or change the alternative). Priorities should really be the same for autoconf2.13 and autoconf2.5. > Once again, this leaves the unknown packages which probably work just fine > with automake 1.6, but might not. If a list was generated for packages > which did not work with 1.5, it may still apply. These packages need to > be tested and those which fail need to be fixed. Out of thousands of > packages, I expect only a handful to require any substantive patches at > all. Of course even if every Debian package were converted to use 1.6 > tomorrow, we'd still need 1.4 for some time yet. Just not several years > from now when the rest of the world is using automake3.14 or so. > The trouble with the 1.4->1.6 conversion is that it often requires some autoconf 2.13->2.5 conversion as well. automake1.5 should be ignored. Scott -- Scott James Remnant Have you ever, ever felt like this? Had strange http://netsplit.com/ things happen? Are you going round the twist?
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