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Re: Use of automake & friends vs. just running configure



On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 04:16:17AM +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 16:09 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

> > 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.

> Except nobody can actually find an example of the good reason anymore,
> which leads me to suspect it's actually bogus.  Automake 1.6 through 1.9
> are largely interchangeable.  I personally keep 1.4 and 1.9 installed,
> and have no problems.

As far as automake versions that should be packaged are concerned, I
agree with you here.  One of the more common failure cases I've seen in
packages that don't use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE, though, is the fact that the
macros automake inserts with aclocal aren't compatible between minor
versions, which causes build failures if the patch-derived aclocal.m4,
configure, and Makefile.in aren't *all* regenned at build time.

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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