Re: Building automake1.9 with autoconf2.61

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Kamaljit,

* Kamaljit Singh wrote on Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 01:00:52AM CET:
> 
> Moreover automake1.9 is dependent on autoconf2.58+ to be present in
> the path that I cant have them in the same sandbox at all !!! I need
> to install autoconf first and then try configuring automake. That
> doesnt seem right.

The Automake package simply depends on autoconf being present and
installed, in order to work right.  That is, you are right in that
we could change Automake's configure to not check for autoconf yet,
and only hope that once installed, there will be a suitable Autoconf
version present.  However: that would mean `make check' would not work
before Autoconf were installed.

It would also mean that the 99.5% of other users (that just may
inadvertently happen to forget to have Autoconf installed when
installing Automake) will get a less informative error, and much
later than possible.  This trade-off goes way in favor against
your rather unusual setup.  I would expect similar reasoning to
be valid for all kinds of packages that depend upon each other
(Autoconf on M4, for example, is similar).

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf