On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 23:34 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 06:10:50PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > > How do you call projects who stick with antiquated tools and ignore many > > years of development? I call them poorly maintained. > > 'Mature'? That would be OK, if these packages "just work", i.e. not force users to using their > Actually while I personally tend to use whatever version of > autoconf is installed for my own stuff, Hear, hear! That's the way the autotools are supposed to be used by _developers_. It may surprise some folks, but it really works without major problems when packages are using the autotools properly (1000s of packages are doing so). One occasionally trips a minor issue when one of the autotools is being upgraded, but nothing actually serious. It really is simple as: You once need to take the plunge, then things are really simple. > I have found a couple of > upstream projects that use autoconf 2.13 and are opposed to upgrading, > so that is going to be a problem. Yes, you will always be able to find projects sticking to antiquated tools and refusing to accept that they are doing something stupid. So far, most packages I have come across sticking with autoconf-2.13 are simply relying on exploiting bugs and undocumented features from autoconf-2.13 (In autoconf-terms: bugwise-compatible configure scripts). Several larger packages suffered from such issues, but if maintainers are willing, these issues can be overcome. Even GCC and almost everything in src/ (aka. ueberbaum, binutils, newlib, gdb, gdb etc.) has managed to do so. Another class of issues is people mixing up "minimum required versions" with "version to use". This causes some developers to use autoconf-2.13, even though it would be suitable for autoconf > 2.13 (Popular in Debian). Ralf -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
