On Jun 28, 2000, Mo DeJong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Sorry, but I just do not see the logic in that argument. If some
> tool has not been updated for 5 years, what are the chances
> someone if going to switch to the new autoconf and expect everything
> to work exactly the same way?
It's the converse: tools that configure and build other tools, such as
RPM, may prefer a consistent interface to build pretty much
everything, instead of having to customize its behavior for old
packages. But the importance of the backward-compatible change
for GNU projects doesn't have much to do with such outdated packages.
It has to do with people being able to mix-and-match the next few
releases of GCC, binutils, GDB, etc, without worrying whether they've
been released with the next autoconf or with the current one.
> As far as our tree goes, the only way this argument makes sense
> is if we import a 5 year old package into devo. In that
> case, it is someone at cygnus that will need to do the work
> to fix the old configure script so that it works with the
> new autoconf.
Correct.
> I can see the logic in the argument that we (cygnus) would not
> want people to use 2.13 in some places and 2.50 in other
> places of out own tree, but that just means that we would
> need to update all the configure scripts in devo at once
> or just keep using 2.13 for some amount of time and then
> switch them all over to 2.50. What problem is not solved
> by either of these approaches?
That's why I said the backward-compatible change is more important for
GNU users in general than for Cygnus and its customers.
> I can see how it is important to use, it means we will
> not have to update any configure scripts for another 2 years.
It means we'll have 2 years or so to update our scripts and
documentation, not that we won't have to change them during that
period.
If we had an easy way to compare dates in shell scripts, we might even
introduce a time-bomb in autoconf that would disable the
backward-compatible behavior after a certain date.
Just kidding :-)
--
Alexandre Oliva Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me
