FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

Christopher Aillon caillon at redhat.com
Tue May 6 15:02:33 UTC 2008


On 05/05/2008 11:43 PM, Casey Dahlin wrote:
> Matthias Clasen wrote:
>> On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 23:28 -0400, Casey Dahlin wrote:
>>
>>  
>>> In light of this, I have a proposal:
>>>
>>> We fix our specs to not use autoconf, and remove the old versions as 
>>> stated, but we keep them around, perhaps in another branch in CVS or 
>>> simply removed from the F10 tag. Then we just wait for complaints. If 
>>> someone comes in and says "I was actively using that" we can just 
>>> slap it back in. After one release cycle we can flush the rest.
>>>
>>>     
>>
>> And we do all this work because we have nothing better to do ?
>> Whats the gain, again ?
>>
>>   
> The gain is we decide what to keep and what not to keep based on who 
> actually is willing to fight to keep it around rather than whoever feels 
> like complaining on devel list. Its a corollary to "its easier to 
> apologize than to ask permission," the people who notice the change are 
> a tiny and far more important subset than the people who will complain 
> ahead of time.

If you'd have read the thread, you'd have noticed I already pointed out 
multiple times, if you want to keep Firefox in the distro, you need to 
keep autoconf213 for the forseeable future.  The path to removing 
autoconf213 lies in someone patching upstream Firefox (along with 
whatever other packages still uses autoconf213) to use newer autotools 
and then waiting several Fedora release cycles, because this change is 
almost certainly not going to happen ever in Firefox 3.  Get it changed 
for Firefox 4 and when that rolls around in F13??, we can talk about 
dropping it.  Even then, there are likely other packages not in our 
distro that want it, and we'd be breaking them.  But to do so now is folly.




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