> On Thursday 08 Jan 2004 04:16, Collins wrote: > > This sounds like a complete crock. �Is this a gentooism that no one > > else in the linux universe would be aware of? > > Mandrake do it too. In fact our autoconf perl script is written by > Mandrake's Guillaume Cottenceaux. > > Peter
I'm not a developer nor even a programmer, but I've been told via some audio development lists (ardour, Jamin, Rosegarden, etc) that this was caused some time ago by a in the autoconf program and some major semantic changes. As an outcome what happened was a lot of older autoconf scripts couldn't use the 2.5x series so both 2.1x and 2.5x needed to exist to handle legacy stuff. As I stated yesterday, what we did on at least one new program's autoconf script (Jamin) was to include the line AC_PREREQ(2.53) as I found I couldn't build under Gentoo without it. Doing this did not hurt other distributions as far as we could tell. This then tells the specific autoconf run which one to use. There's also some online instructions that Mike posted yesterday that use something like WANT_AUTOCONF_2_5 but I think this doesn't work with every autoconf script, so the user is left with changing things as they go along. I'd guess the ebuild maintainers could probably do something to get around this automatically so that poor users like me (who knows nothing about programming or these tools, or heck, even export commands!) ;-) wouldn't have to get messy like this. Someday..... ;-) Mark -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
