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

[Daniel Reed <n ml org>]

On 2004-11-12T11:39-0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
) If someone wants to stand up and advocate that:
)  - we change /bin/rm to take different command line options and/or
)    behave differently every 6 months

/bin/mv's command line options may be changing in one of the next releases
of the GNU Core Utilities. Utilities like /bin/chown have changed their
interface in the past as well (causing script breakage).

In these cases, the maintainers of the changing software determined their
software's previous behavior was wrong. They furthermore determined that
scripts designed around this previous [now-considered-wrong] behavior were
and continue to be broken themselves, and must be fixed regardless of
/bin/mv's or /bin/chown's interface.


It is not the autotools' maintainers expectations that a wide range of
systems will have more than one version of any of the autotools installed
for a prolonged period of time. The API versioning scheme is something of a
kludge to deal with large software collections with unmanageable inertia.

If there is an insistence that packages' build scripts must be generated by
a particular version of the autotools, it may make the most sense to
distribute those generated files to all users. (The autotools should never
be listed as a build requirement for non-tool software.) If the generated
files can be made available in a lookaside repository, or if CVS can be made
to treat the files as opaque blobs, some problems related to the use of a
revision-tracking system as GNOME's distribution mechanism may be avoided.

-- 
Daniel Reed <n ml org>	http://people.redhat.com/djr/	http://naim.n.ml.org/
"True nobility lies not in being superior to another man, but in being
superior to one's previous self."