Re: [Nano-devel] [PATCH 01/10] configure: require autoconf-2.69/automake-1.14

[Benno Schulenberg]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2017, at 19:42, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> The autoconf-2.69 release was made in Apr 2012.
> The automake-1.14 release was made in Jun 2013.
> 
> Update the requirements so we know we can rely on macros/features
> available in those versions.

I have objected to this before.  But... I build the release tarballs
on a fully up-to-date system, having automake-1.15, which means that
if someone takes such a tarball and makes a change that requires the
rebuilding of the configure script, it then /requires/ the presence
of automake-1.15, because this requirement is baked into several of
the m4 scripts.  I think this is ridiculous.  If I want to avoid this,
I would have to purposefully build the release tarballs on an older
system, so that users with systems that are not older than that can
fiddle with the tarball without problems.  (Not that there will be
many users who do that, but /I/ used to that, and with nano it always
worked -- apparently Chris built his releases on sufficiently old
systems, or he had a way to avoid this automatic version pegging.)

Anyway, what I wanted to say is: I will give up my resistance
against this upping of the required versions, since in the tarballs
it is even worse.

Benno

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