Re: After upgrade autoconf from 1.13 to 2.57, I experienced some problems - HELP

[Thomas Dickey]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> * Thomas Dickey wrote on Wed, Dec 06, 2006 at 09:15:12PM CET:
> > On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> >
> > > 2.57 was released six years ago.  I don't think you can expect much help
> >
> > four years as of last week.

agreed that it's been a while.

In contrast, I can plug current ncurses libraries into a system that's
built with ncurses 5.0, and just assume it'll work.  That's from 1999.

> Ouch, apologies for that misread of mine.
>
> > (however, it is not an unreasonable expectation from people that an
> > application be evolved in a upwardly compatible series of versions, and
> > that its maintainers can occasionally point out where interesting bugs
> > were fixed).
>
> Sure.  Could you provide details?

Well in this case for instance (if it were ncurses, xterm, lynx, etc), I'd 
do a little checking before replying, so I understood whether I was 
commenting on a bug-fix, a new bug, or an unavoidable consequence of some 
improvement.  For the first/last of those three, I can generally point to 
a place in the changelog where things changed.  Where the change was 
anticipated, there's often a configuration tweak to provide the old 
behavior (unless it's purely a bug fix).  Doing all of this avoids the 
situation where the maintainer is blindly recommending that people upgrade 
and possibly incur more work than they're willing to for the moment.

So what I'm suggesting is that you (plural) do something like that.

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net