Re: GNU Automake 1.12.1 released

[tsuna]

On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 2:26 AM, Stefano Lattarini
<address@hidden> wrote:
> If they want to work on a project that uses the more modern Automake, they
> should upgrade then.  Installing Automake from sources is not difficult nor
> time consuming.

I agree.  But the fact is that there are hundreds of organizations out
there that build stuff on CentOS and RedHat, which generally come with
severely obsolete autotools, and it's already creating an unnecessary
support burden on package maintainers like me, and removing mkdir_p is
just going to add more to that.  I've been telling people to upgrade
repeatedly for months, but eventually decided to try to make my users'
life easier (and mine too, from a support perspective) by doing what I
can on my end to minimize incompatibilities.

What are we gaining by removing mkdir_p?  Sure it's obsolete, but why
remove it?  Especially when it takes some popular distros around 10
years to ship more recent software.

Don't get me wrong, I'm always trying to fight legacy stuff and get
rid of obsolete cruft.  But autotools have a real issue thanks to many
distributions and organizations that live in the past.

> How so?  Removal of $(mkdir_p) is only planned for Automake 1.13, that is
> still unreleased.

I don't know how exactly yet, but I got a report from a 1.12.1 user
where the Makefile generated by Automake didn't have a definition for
`mkdir_p'.

-- 
Benoit "tsuna" Sigoure
Software Engineer @ www.StumbleUpon.com