Re: [Vala] Vala support for automake

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 01:02 -0400, Yu Feng wrote:
> If a VALA package depends on the features provided in the patch, will
> the distributed tarball(make dist) be compilable on a system with a
> unpatched automake?

Source tarballs do not require automake at all (nor autoconf or libtool)
just to build and install the package. Automake is only required for
development and building from VCS.

> Is VALA itself going to make use of the features once the they are
> accepted in the automake upstream? If so, when? 
> There might be problems, since some distributions doesn't updated their
> automakes timely. (eg RHEL5 didn't even update automake to 1.10.x)

I'd like to switch the vala package itself some time after a stable
automake version with Vala support has been released. I won't switch as
long as it's not widespread, but I don't think we should wait until
enterprise distros have upgraded as it's only needed for development. I
estimate that we can switch in about half a year with the release of
Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10.

Jürg