On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 16:46 +0200, Stepan Kasal wrote: > Hi, > > On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 06:53:59PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > > On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 12:33 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote: > > > Or if autotools maintainers would stop changing the interface so > > > freaking often, this wouldn't be a problem either.... > > Apparently you don't have much clues about the autotools. > > > > They did not change the "interface so often". > > > > There has been one big interface change: It occurred between > > autoconf-2.13 and autoconf-2.50 - Many years ago. > > well, there was also the change in Automake 1.4 -> 1.5, which > happened after that, and then the "stabilization period" for "new" > automake until, say, 1.8. Yep, all this took place such a long time ago, I forgot about this. Probably because, from my experience, this change had been less intrusive. It either broke existing configurations hard and explicit or didn't break them at all. > So it is about 7 years ago since the last interface change and > we can say that Autotools are really stable and mature for at least 4 > years. Matches entirely with my experience. > What _is_ the problem, is that many projects use an undocumented > internals, instead of requesting an enhancement. > And _that_ kind of hacks break very easily with a new release. Fully agreed. If mainstream Linux distros had been a little more aggressive about abandoning support for outdated/discontinued autotools (like they are doing with other tools), people would have learned about their mistakes on autotool usage earlier and would take autotool upgrades with a much more relaxed attitude. Ralf -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
