Re: Automake vs. Automake-NG

[Paolo Bonzini]

Il 21/08/2012 18:30, Ralf Corsepius ha scritto:
>>
>> Yes, that's correct.  PR and advertisement is what lacked in the early
>> Autoconf 2.5x releases.
> 
> Really? That's not how I recall the situation. I recall people turning
> away from autoconf in disgust because of the numerous incompatiblities
> and the often tremendous effort porting would have required.

Yes, that's correct.

Still, in the end the reason was bad planning: 2.50->2.53 were buggy and
introduced backwards-incompatibilities with respect to earlier 2.5x
versions.  There was no advertisement of the actual state, so you had to
figure out that 2.54 and 2.59 were the really stable ones.  There was
also no proactive effort of the maintainers to push changes to other
projects, etc.

In all fairness, it's very difficult to do such a transition for a build
system.  But it's still a lesson to learn, and you _can_ do better with
Automake-NG.

> Instead of "jumping" the "upstream autoconf train", they waited for the
> things to settle/stabilize (some projects are still waiting today) while
> others started to look out for alternatives (cmake, scons) - Many
> switched away.

Yes, that's also what I recall.

Paolo