On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 11:50:52AM -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 11:52:27AM +0100, Stuart Henderson wrote: > > On 2007/10/16 16:10, Amarendra Godbole wrote: > > > A peculiar thing I noticed with many ports is they need different > > > versions of > > > autoconf installed (set through the AUTOCONF_VERSION variable) - so in the > > > end, my system has 3 versions after a couple of port builds (2.13, 2.59, > > > and > > > 2.61). > > > > This isn't a problem. > > The OP seems to think it is or he (she?) wouldn't waste his time > emailing the list or making an offer to a considerable amount of work to > fix it. Rather than just dissing him, why not enlighten us as to why > its not a problem? > > Perhaps address the statement "... they _NEED_ different versions of > autoconf installed...". > > Doug.
Fixing this is a waste of time. Autoconf itself is an issue. Actually a lot of engineering issues. Using it in the first place is a mistake. If you prefer, it's up to external projects to fix up their shit. KDE has stopped using the GNU auto* dreck, and I'm very happy for their switch to cmake. It's already enough of a headache to work around autoconf issues. Unifying them ? nope, not a chance. We have loads of better things to do. >From a practical point of view, each autoconf version is very small, and compiles/installs in just a fraction of the time it would take to `fix' ports to use a common autoconf.
