Re: gettext 0.11.2: Using autoconf 2.53 and automake 1.6.1

[Paul Eggert]

> Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 21:47:12 +0200 (CEST)
> From: Bruno Haible <address@hidden>

> > The gettext audience is developers, not end
> > users, so the real issue is whether a new gettext will work with the
> > current development version of the package.
> 
> The gettext audience are also the Linux distributors....   If, for
> some reason, they want to run gettextize on an ftp.gnu.org release,

I don't offhand know of any Linux distributors that do that.  Do you
know of any?  If not, I wouldn't worry about it.  It seems implausible
to me that a distributor would run gettextize, as gettextize can cause
fairly major changes to the package.

I think it's more plausible that a distributor would run autoconf than
gettextize -- and that's the subject that prompted this thread.

> >   cpio 2.4.2.91 uses Autoconf 2.7.
> >   enscript 1.6.2 uses Autoconf 2.12.
> >   hello 1.3.18 uses Autoconf 2.12.
> >   sharutils 4.2c uses Autoconf 2.12.
> > 
> > If you like, I can submit and publish patches to these last four, as
> > well as for gcal 3.01, to make sure that they work with Autoconf 2.53.
> > That wouldn't be hard, and if it removes the final obstacle to
> > upgrading gettext then I'm willing to do it.
> 
> For gettext to drop autoconf 2.13, I would wait for official releases
> of these packages.

I was talking about the beta versions, but if we're talking about
official versions, then the four packages listed above all use
something older than 2.13, so 2.13 compatibility isn't an important
issue for them.  GNU hello 1.3 is the most extreme case: it uses
Autoconf 1.4, I think.  If we want to wait for all these packages to
officially upgrade, we'll need to wait a looong time.

Anyway, I brought all this up because I was trying to make your life
easier, but I sense that I'm making it more difficult so perhaps I
should stop now.  So long as gettext doesn't make it harder to use
recent Autoconf versions, it's OK with me if it continues to support
older Autoconf versions.