Re: libltdl's (1.5.24) Makefile.in configure ... autotool version mixing?

[David Fang]

> >     So I stripped out libltdl's Makefile.in, configure, aclocal.m4 and
> > force thosed to be regenerated with am-1.9, ac-2.59.  Makefile.in no
> > longer references the nonexistent 'mkinstalldirs' and the top-level
> > dist/distcheck seems happy.
> >     Is this a sin I'm going to pay for?
>
> Should be perfectly fine. This feels like a bug to me, perhaps we should
> have rolled the release with slightly older autotools, the release
> announcement, it seems, *wrongly* promises that libtool can be used with
> older tools.

Hi,
        I'd classify it as a 'nuance' before calling it a bug.  :)  The
problem with rolling back to am-1.9-generated files is that the
Makefile.in's reference 'automake-1.9' and 'aclocal-1.9' (from the
'missing' script arguments), which won't work for someone who only has
1.10.
        No elegant solution comes to mind yet.  Wishful thinking would be
to have the auto-regeneration commands be smarter and attempt autotool
version detection, perhaps through configure-time detection?  Could
produce unexpected interactions though...

> I am not going to release 1.5.26 for this though :)

Not critical for sure, but perhaps worth noting somewhere in the docs?
That libltdl's build support files are generated with version X, but the
above steps can be done to regenerate with version Y.  I can see this
being applicable to other similar packages that can be shipped as
subpackages.

David


David Fang
Computer Systems Laboratory
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Cornell University
http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~fang/
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