Re: Automake vs. Automake-NG

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 08/21/2012 05:09 PM, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> On 21/08/2012 08:06, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> Exactly.  The -NG moniker would have made no sense.  What could have
>> made sense would have been a mapping like
> 
> Yes that would have helped _a lot_.
> 
> Another thing that would have helped would have been out-of-the-box
> support for multiple installed versions, whereas it seems most
> distributions had to reinvent a different way to deal with this.
> 
For what concerns Automake-NG, we might simply rename:

  automake -> automake-ng
  aclocal  -> aclocal-ng

in the end.  So far, I have not done that yet because it would require
changes to at least the Autoconf-owned 'autoreconf' programs and the
Gnulib-owned 'bootstrap' script in order to keep Automake-NG able to
bootstrap several important GNU packages.

> As of today, Gentoo still ships quite a few packages that use autoconf
> 2.1x, and that's quite painful as we can't update them to newer automake
> either (when they use automake at all), at least not without rebuilding
> the buildsystem altogether, which in turn means we have to keep
> automake-1.4 1.5 and so on around. Sigh!
> 

Regards,
  Stefano