FESCo Proposal for blocking older version of autoconf & automake

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 13:08 +0200, Karsten Hopp wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi schrieb:
> 
> > I'm arguing that the problem Karsten thinks he's addressing is 
> > "widespread use of the autotools when there's no need to do it".  If 
> > there are few packages that BuildRequire autotools in the first place, 
> > then there can't be a widespread use of autotools in package building, 
> > let alone a widespread use that is unnecessary.
> > 
> > -Toshio
> > 
> 
> I think you misunderstood my proposal to drop the old autofoo stuff.
> 
> The main reasoning for my proposal was that I think that software packages shouldn't rely
> on old, unmaintained (upstream) helper programs such as p.e. automake-1.4 and that we
> should help upstream to move to more recent autofoo. 
Agreed.

> Raising a barrier by not shipping the
> old stuff anymore and thus maybe forcing upstream maintainers to other distributions was a
> bad idea which I've canceled during this discussion.
I disagree - It had not been a bad idea. 

It would have forced upstreams to learn about their long-term
lazyness/sloppyness is going to evolve into "badness" by being
confronted with a "the train has left the station" effect.

It's what Fedora with almost all other tools all over the place. It's
what is keeping Fedora package-maintainers busy, it's what is keeping
Fedora-based developers technically ahead of developers based on other
distros, etc. -- It's one of the key features Fedora is about.

>  But I still think a guideline that
> new packages should be checked if they can easily ported to current autofoo before they
> get accepted would help us und upstream in the longer term.
There is no need for US to do this. Upstream should do this - It's their
job - It's our job to tell them that their stuff is outdated.

>  Please note that I don't insist
> on having them ported, if it is too complicated to port it should still get accepted.
> But not every package has that many special cases and hacks as the firefox package, most
> should be portable without too much affort and I'm sure most upstream maintainers would be
> glad to get patches for the autofoo stuff.
True.

Ralf