Re: build tools standard

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

James Henstridge <james daa com au> writes:

> Dan Mills wrote:
> 
> > I am unconvinced that any module requires new functionality or a
> > bugfix that can't wait until the next gnome release. Assuming a
> > 6-month release schedule, that's an average of 3 months.  I think
> > that having a workaround for a few months is not an unreasonable
> > thing to ask.
> 
> That sounds fair.  I just object to using tools that are 11 months old
> (autoconf) or 7 months old (automake) at the beginning of the 6 month
> period.

Unlike most of GNOME, the autotools people use tend to come with their
distribution.  The concern I have is that we will drive away potential
developers by making it too hard for them to develop.  On the other
hand, anything that helps kill gnome-common is a good thing in my book.
This will presumably assist that.

> For comparison, the latest versions of autoconf and automake were
> released at the start of December.  I have been using both to build
> and release tarballs and they seem fairly solid.  They have added
> support for marking features deprecated in the new autoconf and
> automake releases, so using them should help developers make their
> build infrastructure forward compatible with newer releases.

Good.

> I _really_ don't want to get to a point where we start 2.5 development
> and find updating to current build tools is impossible because we are
> relying on bugs in the old versions.

Just because I'm curious, which bugs/features are we hitting?  Do we
need to work much more closely with the autoconf/automake maintainers?

Thanks,
-Jonathan