On Aug 25, 2018, at 10:23 AM, Basin Ilya <basinilya@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I have a VM with RHEL 6.8, because that's what our customers build our software on. And when I change anything in configure.ac, I test it there.
> Of course, such conservative attitude is unnecessary for open source projects, but supporting four year old autotools looks reasonable.
Any open source project should know its audience. I run one where we maintain compatibility with software up to about 10-12 years old, just because it’s that sort of project. Consequently, new releases get tested on a CentOS 5 box, even though that’s “unsupported” by the distro and its upstream.
It sounds like the developers of the software project the OP is currently fighting with don’t understand that they have users not out on the bleeding edge with themselves. He should be getting that message to them, not blaming Autotools.
Version numbers, properly used, are not “useless.” See
https://semver.org/
for one particularly well thought out argument.
Done properly, a good version numbering system lets users make correct inferences about what a given version change means. That’s highly useful.
The trick is getting developers to declare their versioning system’s meanings and to stick to it.
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