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Re: [RFC] Update to current automake/autoconf/libtool versions.


Sure, but is it really a common situation where we are neither able to revert to a previous released version of libtool, or get a release of the upstream tools made with the needed fix in a timely fashion?

[ Here I wake up from my optimistic reverie and proceed to answer my own rhetorical question: ]

The answer to this, of course, is "yes," and I agree that poor backwards compatibility from autoconf-2.13 to autoconf-2.50 is the real source of the problem here. My point is that the current solution doesn't seem to be addressing the real problem --- we have essentially created our own forked versions of all of the autotools, with no visible plans to re-merge to the FSF version, and no intent to maintain the forked version on our own.

I'm not arguing that it will never be necessary to fork our own version of autotools in the case of a short-term emergency (well actually, I might argue that, but I'm not arguing it here). I'm just arguing that a forked version of binutils with no clear upstream referent is a particularly bad state of affairs:

-rw-r--r-- 1 77 1002 259210 Feb 27 2000 autoconf-000227.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 77 1002 292827 Feb 27 2000 automake-000227.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 77 1002 519132 Feb 27 2000 gettext-000227.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 77 1002 370603 Feb 27 2000 libtool-000227.tar.bz2


On Thursday, December 5, 2002, at 03:24 PM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

Klee Dienes <klee@apple.com> writes:

As long as the versions of the tools are specified by a version string
referencing an official version in README-maintainer-mode, and not by
"whatever version is on sourceware.cygnus.com", I'm happy.
That works until there is a bug which is a problem for the binutils
but there is not yet a new release.

It's not a theoretical point.  That's the reason we started using
versions stored on sources.redhat.com in the first place.

Ian






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