Re: more build sherrif-ery (and a touch of auto*)

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Kjartan Maraas wrote:

> tor, 11,.11.2004 kl. 12.01 -0500, skrev Havoc Pennington:
>  
>
> > On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 23:28 +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
> >    
> >
> > > If a package works with multiple automake versions, it is best to pick 
> > > the newest release, since the older versions contain known bugs (based 
> > > on the contents of the NEWS file).
> > >      
> > Packages should never "symlink" to unknown future/possible-incompatible
> > releases. That's like having a function that does something undefined,
> > or calling parse_some_unknown_format() on a file of known format.
> >
> > Packages should only use names (e.g. the automake-1.x names) that have
> > an interface contract.
> >    
>
> I got the impression that James meant that if a package will build with
> multiple automake versions it's better to stick with the newest release
> since that has more bugfixes etc. We probably have packages that *could*
> use anything from 1.6-1.9 without problems? Or maybe I misunderstood
> James totally :)
>  
That is what I was trying to say (although you said it a lot clearer).

While there were big differences between Automake 1.4 and 1.5 (partly 
due to the length of time between releases) that would warrant parallel 
installation, the differences between newer Automake minor series has 
been a lot smaller.

A number of the minor version bumps seem to have been due to increases 
in the minimum required autoconf version rather than a significant user 
visible changes.

James.