Re: gnome-autogen.sh

[Ralf Corsepius <corsepiu faw uni-ulm de>]

Am Don, 2002-12-12 um 16.04 schrieb Thomas Vander Stichele:
> Hello,
> 
> I checked gnome-autogen.sh, and it seems there is no real way to somehow 
> enforce minimal versions of autotools.  I'd like to be able to fail on 
> using automake < 1.5
> 
> Now, I did a lot of similar stuff for gstreamer's autogen.sh stage, and I 
> would like to move some of those ideas to gnome-autogen.sh as well.
> 
> I was wondering what other people think of this, and how they would prefer 
> that this works ?
> 
> To give an examples, we could do something like
> 
> a) have autogen.sh set AUTOMAKE_VERSION=1.5
>    and gnome-autogen.sh would loop over a set of possible automakes
>    (AUTOMAKES="automake-1.7 automake-1.6 automake-1.5 automake)
>    which it would check for.
>   This last list could be overruled by autogen.sh as well if necessary.
> 
> b) add options to autogen.sh like --with-automake to specify an alternate
>    automake
>    This would potentially clash with gnome's autogen behaviour which 
>    passes all arguments to autogen.sh straight to configure.
> 
> Thoughts/suggestions ?
Hmm, IMHO, you are missing one essential problem:

Though there exist incompatibilities between different versions of
automake, the main troublemaker is autoconf's incompatibilities.
(Eg. the cause of the AC_DEFINE warnings is autoconf. The cause of the
autom4te*.caches is autoconf etc.)

In addition to that I can't think of any good reason, why people would
want to use automake-1.6.x - It's largely compatible to automake-1.7.x,
except that it requires a different minimum version autoconf

Ralf