On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 11:15:20AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org> writes: > > > Autoconf is pretty stable, > > This has not been the experience of many of us. I haven't had a lot of > trouble fixing things for newer releases of Autoconf, but I definitely > have seen issues. So far I haven't, but I readily believe they do exist. :-) > And the Autoconf 2.13 to 2.50 transition and all the subsequent > instability was not that long ago. Ok, but I don't think anything like that should happen again soon. If it does become as unstable as automake, we can just use the same versioning system in our packages. Also, updating autoconf becomes a bit more tricky, like updating gcc currently is. It should all be fine, but when actually doing it, some packages don't like it anyway. I think this is acceptable. There's always the easy quick-fix of build-depending on the old version (which should then remain in the archive). Of course, all this is only needed if it turns out that these problems aren't just hypothetical. > > so I suppose you're talking about automake. Because of its interface > > instability, you should never depend on "automake", but always on > > "automake1.10" (or whatever version you tested with). > > Just FYI: > > windlord:~> apt-cache policy automake1.10 > automake1.10: > Installed: (none) > Candidate: (none) > Version table: It's a virtual package, provided by automake. When 1.11 is released, I suppose it becomes a real package. Perhaps it's nicer to make "automake" virtual, not "automake1.10", but it doesn't make much difference IMO. Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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