Re: debbugs, and a FAQ, for Autotools

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello,

* Miles Bader wrote on Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 05:17:29AM CET:
> Ralf Hemmecke writes:
> > Sure. But it is also relevant if one developer adds a macro which is
> > only available in some recent version of automake, say. Another
> > developer might not yet have that automake version.
> 
> It doesn't really seem any worse than _any_ potential tool
> incompatibility problem -- compiler version, library version, etc --
> though...
> 
> Usually those issues aren't such a huge deal, because most project try
> to be relatively portable, and when version dependencies do crop up,
> they can be dealt with relatively well using simple checks in the
> configure script.
> 
> Isn't that what people usually do about autoconf versions too (declare a
> minimum version in configure.ac)?

Yes.  You can even declare a maximum (or exact) version, too, if that is
what you need.  We did that in GCC, see the _GCC_AUTOCONF_VERSION_CHECK
macro in http://gcc.gnu.org/viewcvs/trunk/config/override.m4?view=markup
and with Automake, it should work at least to test $am__api_version at
configure time.  I guess we should make it possible to test easily at
m4 run time too ...

(and I guess this is worth another FAQ entry ...)

Cheers,
Ralf