Re: Fw: UPDATED (glib-gettextize patch)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au> writes: 
> (1) There are a couple of new features added between autconf 2.13 and
> 2.5 that will make our life easier as GNOME gets ported to more
> platforms.

This is really minor and not-worth-any-interesting-amount-of-pain
sort of stuff.

> (2) The people affected are only those who are building from CVS.

Even if true (it isn't quite, because if you patch configure.in you
need to re-run autoconf), that's still a ton of people, and plenty of
them are not auto* experts or excited about changing core system
components.
 
> In general, though, I thought we had already had this discussion back
> in about May and decided that autoconf-2.5x and automake-1.4x were
> appropriate (in the context of GNOME 2), but not automake-1.5. At some
> point it would be nice if we just decided to live with earlier
> decisions.

I don't remember the specific thread; I agree we should try to live
with decisions, in general. 

My impression was that only libglade and one other lib I forget
required autoconf 2.5. For a long time I was just patching those
packages to remove the trivial and gratuitous 2.5 dependency. I
upgraded to 2.5 now, but for some unrelated reason.

Martin had added AC_PREREQ(2.52) to a bunch of configure.in, but we
took them all out, because none of those configure.in actually
required 2.5.

It's quite easy to have a configure.in that works with _either_ 2.13
or 2.5, I haven't yet seen an interesting dependency on 2.5 (actual
use of a hard-to-duplicate 2.5 feature). Fact is we could strip all
2.5 deps out of the GNOME 2 modules in about 5 minutes. That's why it
seems like such a pointless requirement.

I don't feel that strongly about it, I guess most people are using vbs
or have already upgraded to 2.5.

Havoc