Re: autoconf-2.68b released [beta]

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2012, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> i don't think that matters.  bzip2 is often not installed by default, nor is
> gcc or g++ or any other development program.  i find it hard to swallow that
> this is even a small obstacle to someone who is installing autoconf manually
> by fetching the tarball and running configure+make.

It is pretty common to find myself on a system with a working compiler 
and tools, but not the exact versions of autoconf, automake, and 
libtool that my projects need.

Projects which don't store generated files in the source control 
repository suffer additional pain if it becomes more difficult to 
install autoconf, automake, and libtool on whatever machines they 
happen upon so that the project may be built.  More pain results in 
less portable projects which have not been tested on as many operating 
systems and types of machines.

Gzip is almost universally available so I don't think that 
distribution support for it should be dropped by autotools.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/