On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 13:08 +0200, Karsten Hopp wrote: > Toshio Kuratomi schrieb: > > > I'm arguing that the problem Karsten thinks he's addressing is > > "widespread use of the autotools when there's no need to do it". If > > there are few packages that BuildRequire autotools in the first place, > > then there can't be a widespread use of autotools in package building, > > let alone a widespread use that is unnecessary. > > > > -Toshio > > > > I think you misunderstood my proposal to drop the old autofoo stuff. > > The main reasoning for my proposal was that I think that software packages shouldn't rely > on old, unmaintained (upstream) helper programs such as p.e. automake-1.4 and that we > should help upstream to move to more recent autofoo. Agreed. > Raising a barrier by not shipping the > old stuff anymore and thus maybe forcing upstream maintainers to other distributions was a > bad idea which I've canceled during this discussion. I disagree - It had not been a bad idea. It would have forced upstreams to learn about their long-term lazyness/sloppyness is going to evolve into "badness" by being confronted with a "the train has left the station" effect. It's what Fedora with almost all other tools all over the place. It's what is keeping Fedora package-maintainers busy, it's what is keeping Fedora-based developers technically ahead of developers based on other distros, etc. -- It's one of the key features Fedora is about. > But I still think a guideline that > new packages should be checked if they can easily ported to current autofoo before they > get accepted would help us und upstream in the longer term. There is no need for US to do this. Upstream should do this - It's their job - It's our job to tell them that their stuff is outdated. > Please note that I don't insist > on having them ported, if it is too complicated to port it should still get accepted. > But not every package has that many special cases and hacks as the firefox package, most > should be portable without too much affort and I'm sure most upstream maintainers would be > glad to get patches for the autofoo stuff. True. Ralf -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
