Re: new vs old autoconf / Re: checking for non-standard headers

[Russ Allbery]

Guido Draheim <address@hidden> writes:

> btw, http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4698 for another
> indication that new-vs-old is still a major pain these days as
> distro makers are shipping atleast two versions of the software
> and developers need to have some awareness of that. Which should
> not be in the first place of course.

Debian handles this well with an autosensing wrapper.

You have to provide Autoconf 2.13 functionality.  If you don't, some
significant packages like GCC and XEmacs can't be modified easily.  I know
that GCC is working on a conversion, slowly.  I have no idea if XEmacs is
even starting.

XEmacs isn't really the fault of the Autoconf maintainers; they dug their
hooks pretty deeply into undocumented Autoconf internals, and it's not at
all surprising that a significant new release broke their code.  (It
really should have been called Autoconf 3.0, IMO.  But water under the
bridge now.)

I finally was able to get rid of the last package that needed Autoconf 1
only a year or so ago.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>