Re: Tool version in HACKING

[Marius Vollmer]

Gary Houston <address@hidden> writes:

> > on 2001-11-22, you have removed the required tool version numbers from
> > the HACKING file (see ChangeLog entry below).  Why did you do this?
> > 
> > I think they are an important bit of information since Guile will
> > indeed not work with all old versions.
> > 
> >     2001-11-22  Gary Houston  <address@hidden>
> > 
> >             * HACKING: Modified the Hacking It Yourself section.
> >             Removed the version numbers from the tools.
> 
> The versions seemed a bit out of date, and the last policy I remember
> is that the latest released versions are always used.

Ahh, I see.  I didn't know about the "latest released versions" rule.

> Since it's easy to find out what the versions are, it doesn't seem
> necessary to list them in the file and saves the confusion when the
> released versions differ from the file versions (is the file correct
> or did somebody just forget to update it?)

Yes, that makes sense to me.  Since we can now request specific
automake and autoconf versions from Makefile.am and configure.in
directly, we should just do this.  I.e., we now have AC_PREREQ(2.53)
in configure.in which will fail for autoconf versions less than 2.53.