Re: patch to invalidate Autom4te cache upon upgrade

[Ben Pfaff]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

> Following up to your May 25 message
> <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2006-05/msg00127.html> re
> Debian bug 219621, I was thinking of incorporating the proposed fix
> into Autoconf before the 2.61 release, but ran into a couple of
> problems:
>
> Using the timestamp as a version number is a bit of a hack.  Perhaps
> it'd be better to use the Autoconf version number, i.e., the first
> line of $version in bin/autom4te.in.

Using the Autoconf version number makes better sense for upstream
Autoconf.  I chose a time stamp because I wanted a different
version number every time I created a Debian package.  It was
slightly easier to use a time stamp than to extract the Debian
package version.

> Second and more trivially, I'd feel a bit more comfortable matching
> the entire first line of the cache file, rather than looking for a
> space, followed by the version number, followed by any single
> character, at the end of the first line.
>
> I hope these changes would be OK with you.  But at any rate this
> should wait until after 2.61 is out, since my ideas haven't been
> tested.

These changes would be fine, of course.  I don't know whether
this is considered legally significant, or whether my actual code
to do this is of any interest, as opposed to the idea.  If you
want me to sign papers for Autoconf I'll do so.
-- 
RMS on DRM: "This ought to be a crime. And, if we had governments of the
people, by the people, for the people, then the executives of those companies
would be in prison.  But they're not in prison, and the reason is that we have
government of the people, by the sell-outs, for the corporations."