On 02/02/2013 01:40 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote: >> I subscribe to all the good opinions about NG that have been >> made here. I would definitely use it once there is a release >> (I have already been criticized several times for having used >> then-CVS versions of the Autotools in Bison, and I don't want >> to go in that direction again). >> > Oh, but I wasn't suggesting to use Automake-NG to bootstrap an official > GNU package!
Why not? The end product tarball will require GNU make, but other than that, the end user won't care whether automake or Automake-NG was used to create the tarball. Besides, it is already possible to use automake in a manner that requires GNU make, so end users of those packages won't notice a difference. I guess where it might matter is if distros try to rerun Automake-NG as aggressively as they try to rerun automake on existing packages. Existing distros have stacked the autotools so that they can rerun the same version of automake as a package was originally built with, even if a newer automake has been released since then. So if Automake-NG releases are breaking backwards compatibility for the first little while due to being at alpha quality, that implies that distros will have to repeat their efforts on providing a stacked Automake-NG release for any cases where a package needs to be re-autotooled as part of the distro process. On the other hand, most of the cases where distros end up relying on stacked automake is for packages that aren't actively maintained upstream, and therefore need to have their configure.ac and Makefile.am patched downstream. It can be assumed that the early adopters of Automake-NG are still active, and will be released frequently enough, that it will be easier to fix issues upstream and re-release than to make the distros have to carry downstream patches against configure.ac and Makefile.am that require rerunning the autotools as part of the distro process. -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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