Re: [Nano-devel] [PATCH 01/10] configure: require autoconf-2.69/automake-1.14

[Benno Schulenberg]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2016, at 07:47, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On 22 Apr 2016 21:14, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> > In my opinion it should be possible to build nano from git on a stock
> > installation of any stable or LTS version of a distro that is still
> > being maintained.
> 
> honestly, "any" is unrealistic, and nano already violates it.  when you
> bumped the autoconf requirement to 2.61, that cut out RHEL4 & RHEL5 which
> are both LTS and actively maintained through 2017 & 2020

Well, the bump is on my name, but it was required because a patch
by you introduced the use of the ONCE macro a week earlier.  (The
use of that macro was discontinued a few months ago, so in theory
we could lower the requirement again.)

> shipping autoconf-2.59 there.  the RHEL lifetime is >10 years.  trying to
> support 15+ year old devtools is a pointless exercise imnsho.

Yes, 15 years is stretching it, and even 10 years is.  No, what I was
thinking of was the lifetime of Ubuntu LTS releases: 5 years.  Meaning:
don't require dev tools that are less than six years old.

> > The value is in being able to build nano from git on an old but still
> > maintained distro without needing to install anything else.
> 
> "anything else" ?  you need to install a bunch of dev packages before you
> can build nano (or any other package) from source.

Sure, the user needs several dev packages, but not anything that the
distro itself doesn't provide.

> > On that old system no dev package of pkg-config existed.
> > And it worked fine with the older, native auto* things.
> 
> it's not an autotool version issue.  if you don't have pkg-config
> available, then you can't build nano.

The system did have pkg-config installed; it just wasn't split into
a dev and a normal part.

Benno

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