Re: Removal of libtool1.4
Scripsit Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com>
> On Sat, 2004-01-17 at 20:24, Henning Makholm wrote:
> > Anybody got a good automatic way of checking whether a configure.in
> > will require nontrivial porting for use on 2.5x?
> Run autoupdate and see if it explodes?
Possibly. Is it easy to notice the explosion mechanically?
When I tried to rerun aclocal & autoconf (not libtoolize) for a package
on a system that had the wrong version of /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4
installed, what I got was an error that did not manifest until *build*
time. Not an error from autoconf; not an error from the generated
configure script. Only when the build process reached 'make all' did
things begin to go visibly wrong.
> > Therefore, I hold that if we remove libtool1.4, then it becomes a bug
> > if the internal configuration infrastructure in a package cannot be
> > rebuilt without having libtool1.4 installed.
> There isn't any reason you'd want to run libtoolize again though, unless
> you intend to update to 1.5.
No, but /usr/bin/libtoolize is not the only thing provided by the
libtool package.
As described above, not having the correct libtool available means
that one cannot regenerate the *configure* script, and there are all
sorts of reaons to want to do that, even as a Debian maintainer.
Policy 4.3 directly recommends editing configure.in and regenerating
configure when one needs to change the package's compiled-in
configuration in ways not supported by the upstream build
infrastructure.
> Once you've done it, you never have to do it again unless you do
> something foolish like remove the files it adds.
You mentioned yourself that libtool has to be updated explicitly with
support for new architectures. So at least porters will have to
regenerate files once in a while.
> So what did you need the libtool1.4 package for, again? :-)
For maintaining packages that has not been ported to autoconf 2.5x.
If you want to stop maintaining libtool1.4 it's of course your
right to so - put please orphan the package rather than having it
removed.
--
Henning Makholm "Nej, hvor er vi altså heldige! Længe
leve vor Buxgører Sansibar Bastelvel!"
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