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

[Carl Worth <cworth redhat com>]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:20:59 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> What we may be able to do, if some of the automake releases are in fact
> compatible, is group the compatible ones via autogen.sh. e.g. if a
> package whitelists 1.7 it could automatically whitelist 1.8 also
> (assuming those two are compatible, I have no idea if they are).

There are two things that would help a great deal in this respect:

1) automake should not provide a different named binary if the
   interface is backwards compatible. (Havoc has already
   mentioned this earlier).

2) automake should use its version number in a consistent way to
   indicate compatibility (or not) between releases. For example, the
   widespread practice of incrementing the major number for
   backwards-incompatible releases would work well here.

-Carl