Karsten Hopp wrote:
Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 23:43 -0400, Casey Dahlin wrote:
The gain is we decide what to keep and what not to keep based on who
actually is willing to fight to keep it around rather than whoever
feels like complaining on devel list. Its a corollary to "its easier
to apologize than to ask permission," the people who notice the
change are a tiny and far more important subset than the people who
will complain ahead of time.
It doesn't account for the developers who will have failures, notice we
don't package a version of autoconf anymore and say "Screw that" and
move to some other development platform which does support what they
need.
My $.02 worth of thoughts:
One could imagine a policy in which new packages using these tools
would not be accepted per-se, while the tools would still be
available, packaged, for those other packages and developers that need
it.
Does such, or something similar, make sense?
Such a policy would be ok with me. The whole intention for this proposal
was
to disencourage usage of the old tools, not to force maintainers to
rewrite their
configure scripts immediately or use another distribution.
Nonetheless maintainers of forementioned packages should check if it is
necessary to run autofoo during the build. Most of the times it isn't
and if I
remember correctly even I am guilty of doing this due to laziness and/or
time
constraints.
The problem with talking about removing these packages is that the
packages may not need to run the autotools during build at present but
that doesn't mean they don't have to be run at some indefinite point in
the future.
For release 1.0-1.4 of libfoo, upstream didn't require any patching so
everything worked fine. In release 1.5, upstream made a mess of how
they create and deploy some utilities built with libfoo. In order to
fix this, you have to patch the configure.ac and Makefile.am. Suddenly
you need to have the autotools to be able to build.
(Note: whether you run the autotools from within the spec file or run
them locally and then include the diff with the SRPM, you may still need
to have matching versions of the autotools available to make everything
work. Getting this right needs to do a lot of upstream education before
it can be removed from the distro.)
-Toshio
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