an update to automake-1.11?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 11:09:51PM -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
>      2. improves the resiliency of the package build to changes to
>         Fedora's autotools chain.

Many projects come with public source repositories, and those don't
include the binary configure/Makefile.in files.  You usually build
those locally with a script like 'autogen.sh'.  Projects that depend
on precise versions of the autotools are just going to break under
those conditions.

libguestfs is a case in point - the Debian maintainer builds it from
git using some unknown version of autoconf, and I build it on RHEL and
Fedora using other versions of autoconf.  If there was a bug reported
to me that configure.ac didn't work on (eg.) Debian's autoconf, I'd
consider it a bug in the project itself, and I wouldn't tell the
Debian maintainer to install a specific autoconf.

It's better in the long term to fix the configure.ac so that it can
work with any version of autotools.  If it requires some specific
version or a narrow range of versions, I'd consider it broken.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora now supports 75 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)
http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora