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Re: Patches to README-release


From: Gary V. Vaughan
Subject: Re: Patches to README-release
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:14:07 +0700

Hi Jim,

On 28 Jan 2012, at 16:28, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
>> I'm wondering what purpose AC_PREREQ (etc) really
>> serves if you're not using them to encode the versions of the autotools that 
>> are
>> required to bootstrap a package in the way expected by the maintainers.
> 
> It permits one to build the package unmodified on systems for which
> the latest version of autoconf will never be available.
> This is a big for e.g., libvirt.

That's a good point.  So, will users of libvirt (when using compatible older 
autotools
releases) want to be able to run bootstrap?

If so, then my implementation in saner bootstrap is correct, and keeping the 
paragraph
in README-release we're discussing is correct too... but I need to revise my 
thinking
about AC_PREREQ and friends a little, and not misuse them to name latest stable
releases.  And also make a point of testing old versions of autotools to 
reaffirm the
correctnesss of AC_PREREQ (etc), which is something I stopped doing a while ago 
as it
consumes a lot of time, for (what I then thought) was little tangible gain.

If not, then $buildreq can be used to manually specify latest stable releases of
autotools, since libvirt rebootstrappers will be running the tools alone (e.g. 
auto-
reconf rather than bootstrap), and AC_PREREQ can continue to specify minimum 
compatible
version numbers.

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)




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