Re: distinguish automake 1.11 from 1.12+ at autoconf time

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 08/07/2012 01:36 AM, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 08/06/2012 05:29 PM, Peter Johansson wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'd like to distinguish automake 1.11 from 1.12 (or later) at autoconf
> > time. I wonder is there's any documented macro that was introduced in
> > 1.12 that I could use to m4_ifdef?
>
> If nothing else, the autoconf philosophy of feature checks being better
> than version checks should guide your decision here.
I regret, but this is wishful thinking.

The sad reality is automake releases often are incompatible and suffer 
from different deliberate/non-deliberate behavioral changes.

> What _specific_ feature are you using from 1.12 that wasn't present in
> 1.11?

You know, you know which features I am missing ;)

A true killer for my current work is this:
 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-automake/2012-04/msg00100.html

I haven't check the current status, but I'd expect upcoming potential 
killers will be the AM_CONFIG_DIR/ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS changes and multilib 
related changes.

> Or put another way, either your configure.ac works equally well
> with both versions (so you don't care which version), or there's
> something you do with 1.12 that doesn't work with 1.11 and therefore you
> are trying to make it conditional so that 1.11 can still process the
> rest of the file.  Determine that feature, and we are that much closer
> to helping you conditionalize your configure.ac to work with both versions.

My issue is newer versions of automake being incompatible with 
preceeding versions and newer versions silently breaking behaviors 
without any warning.

Ralf