Re: more build sherrif-ery (and a touch of auto*)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 14:47 -0500, Daniel Reed wrote:
> Outside of GNOME, a package that needs a call to Automake that does not
> define what version it prefers will get the newest installed (currently up
> to 1.9).
> 
> Inside GNOME, a package that needs a call to Automake that does not define
> what version it prefers will get the oldest installed (down to 1.4).

It doesn't make any difference what "unspecified" means because everyone
should specify.

unspecified = 1.4 because currently everyone specifies except those
modules still untested with >1.4, since ability to specify was added in
order to support 1.5 users. i.e. the modules that don't specify are
expecting 1.4.

If you want to add REQUIRED_VERSION=1.4 to all the modules that don't
specify, we could make unspecified result in an error message:
 "Must specify which versions of automake your module will be tested
with and support. The latest version on your system is X.Y. To specify
set REQUIRED_VERSION=X.Y"

But we can't change unspecified version to be a "symlink" to the latest
version. You can't symlink strcmp to strdup, and you can't symlink ls to
rm, and you can't symlink and automake with behavior A to automake with
behavior B. You can only use the same name for things that have the same
interface contract.

It's fine to sort the whitelist newest-first, but you have to whitelist.

If the whitelist isn't explicit (unspecified), the reasonable behaviors
are: 1) some fixed-forever default whitelist, such as "1.4" or 2) an
error. But 3) an ever-changing whitelist would be wrong, since it isn't
a whitelist at that point.

Havoc