plan to drop automake-1.6 from jhbuild

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Currently jhbuild builds a large number of versions of automake during 
bootstrap (currently 1.4-p6, 1.6.3, 1.7.9, 1.8.5 and 1.9.1), which is 
only going to grow in the future.

Out of the ones jhbuild currently distributes, the ones I think 
definitely need to be there include:

   * automake-1.4: some packages are still using ancient Automake
     (although it would be nice to upgrade the last few of these packages).
   * automake-1.7: GTK 2.4 depends on this particular version.
   * automake-1.9: it should be easy for a package to use the latest
     automake (or just test against it), so we don't end up in the
     situation we were in a few years back where we are stuck with an
     old unsupported automake version.

I'd like to drop 1.6.3 from the jhbuild bootstrap list, since it is 
mostly compatible with 1.7 and it contains known bugs that have been 
fixed in later releases.  At some point, it might be worth removing 1.8 too.

What does everyone else think about this?

If this sounds like a good idea, then it would be good to update the 
autogen scripts for modules that are currently requesting automake >= 
1.6 and change them to >= 1.7.  Since glib requires automake-1.7, anyone 
wanting to build a module that depends on glib will need automake-1.7 
installed, so allowing 1.6 does not help them.

James.

--
Email: james jamesh id au
WWW:   http://www.jamesh.id.au/