Re: Use of automake & friends vs. just running configure
Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com> writes:
> On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 13:38 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> It doesn't help that there are something like four different, mutually
>> incompatible versions of Automake all in active use by various
>> packages.
> Can you please illustrate an example of backwards incompatibility? That
> would be a bug that needs to be fixed.
Well, notice that we have five different versions of Automake in Debian.
If Automake were fully backward-compatible, we would only have one or two
versions; those other versions are still present for good reason.
These days, Automake has been improved to print out a big version mismatch
warning if aclocal didn't match, which is a significant improvement. One
of the problems is that the dependency rules frequently run automake
without aclocal, which doesn't work.
It's more likely to work for simple packages if they're modified to run
both aclocal and automake, but with more complex packages you run into the
fact that Automake really has changed over time, and the language that the
current versions support is not exactly the same as the language that
earlier versions support. It's like trying to run Python 1.x code under
Python 2.x (or, because of all the versions of Automake running around,
sometimes running Python 2.x code under Python 1.x); it mostly works for
simple stuff, and even much complex stuff, but when it doesn't work the
breakage can be subtle.
It's a problem that the Automake folks are certainly aware of. They added
the ability to easily install multiple versions back in 1.6 in part
because of some of this. Most of the recent incompatibilities have been
driven by new Autoconf requirements more than changes to the Automake
language itself, as far as I can tell, but going to new versions of
Autoconf can also cause problems for more complex packages.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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