I guess it's time for me to chime in. Dave Mills expect NTP to compile on anything he can get his hands on.
I've been lucky so far in that some of the older gear he has is breaking. I do, however, still support SunOS4.1 and Ultrix. And NTP will still use ansi2knr where needed. I am also working toward implementing a configuration management mechanism that lets me keep multiple versions of software packages available. So as long as there is *some* way for me to deal with ancient hardware I'm happy. As far as recent versions of automake and autoconf go, as long as the last version of automake and autoconf that build with ancient tools actually work I'm probably set. The big gap after autoconf-2.13 and automake-1.4 was Difficult for me, as I had to use CVS versions to get patches I needed. On another note, right around Y2K I had a client call when they "discovered" an old Pyramid box (an active mail server) hidden in a room. They knew they couldn't turn it off and they knew it was never going to be Y2K compatible. I had *remarkable* time finding a way to find/compile something to handle their problem (I ended up with a simple TCP proxy that forwarded SMTP traffic to a new machine, and this software was simple enough that it could be compiled with the native compiler; I was unable to get any of my Old versions of gcc to build on that box.) H
