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