Re: Removal of libtool1.4
Henning Makholm wrote:
> Scripsit Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com>
>
>> 3) It is only required when used with Autoconf 2.13, which is also no
>> longer maintained upstream.
>
> This worries me a bit. Some upstream authors refuse to use autoconf
> 2.5x on general principles - could dropping libtool1.4 support mean
> that certain bugs in their packages can only be fixed if one *also*
> ports their configure.in to 2.5x and keeps that port seperately
> maintained forever after?
What "general principles"?
*snip*
>> And the silly thing is, it's not actually that *hard* to update lagging
>> software to use Autoconf 2.5x,
>
> It may be hard to keep such an update up-to-date if upstream refuses
> to accept a patch. Some upstream users of autoconf 2.13 use private
> extensions which make more-or-less heavy use of undocumented 2.13
> internals and won't upgrade easily to 2.5x.
>
> (I discovered one such example when I did a private fork of xterm,
> whose author is a 2.13 believer, and tried to upgrade the autoconf
> input to 2.5x. It took a serious amount of rewriting, and some of the
> macros I simply had to comment out).
Why does the author believe in 2.13 but not more recent versions. If you
have actually gotten xterm working with a modern version of autoconf,
please contribute these changes to freedesktop.org.
wt
--
Warren Turkal
President, GOLUM, Inc.
http://www.golum.org
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