FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 11:04 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> On 05/06/2008 07:44 AM, Karsten Hopp wrote:
> > Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> >> Jesse Keating wrote:
> >>> On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 23:43 -0400, Casey Dahlin wrote:
> >>>> 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.
> >>>
> >>> It doesn't account for the developers who will have failures, notice we
> >>> don't package a version of autoconf anymore and say "Screw that" and
> >>> move to some other development platform which does support what they
> >>> need.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >> My $.02 worth of thoughts:
> >>
> >> One could imagine a policy in which new packages using these tools 
> >> would not be accepted per-se, while the tools would still be 
> >> available, packaged, for those other packages and developers that need 
> >> it.
> >>
> >> Does such, or something similar, make sense?
> >>
> > 
> > Such a policy would be ok with me. The whole intention for this proposal 
> > was
> > to disencourage usage of the old tools, not to force maintainers to 
> > rewrite their
> > configure scripts immediately or use another distribution.
> > Nonetheless maintainers of forementioned packages should check if it is
> > necessary to run autofoo during the build. Most of the times it isn't 
> > and if I
> > remember correctly even I am guilty of doing this due to laziness and/or 
> > time
> > constraints.
> 
> Doing it during the build is not the issue.  You can't even generate a 
> patch to configure if the tool to do regenerate it is not available in 
> the distro.

Wrong. Of cause - you can.

Ralf