On Thu, 29 Apr 2010, Russ Allbery wrote:
I think this just varies based on what your developers are like and how closed your project is, basically. People often say that they find it fairly easy to make all developers on a project use identical versions of the autotools. I find that sort of mind-boggling, since it would be absolutely impossible for the projects that I work on. People contribute to my projects using everything from NetBSD to Solaris, versions of Linux from RHEL 4 to Debian unstable, and all sorts of random locally-installed versions of stuff. I usually don't even have exactly the same versions of Autoconf and Automake on all the different systems that *I* use to do development.
I find that it typically takes less than ten minutes to install current released FSF autotools on a system. It is unfortunate that your project contributors are so challenged.
What I do find challenging are projects which provide autotools source files which don't work with current released FSF autotools, use custom m4 macros which are not included in the source tree, or indicate which versions might actually work.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
