On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 11:27:24AM +0200, Antoine Pitrou wrote: > On Tue, 16 Oct 2012 05:05:23 -0400 > Trent Nelson <tr...@snakebite.org> wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 01:43:37AM -0700, Charles-François Natali wrote: > > > > My understanding is that we use a specific version of autoconf. > > > > The reason is that otherwise we end up with useless churn in the repo > > > > as the generated file changes when different committers use different > > > > versions. In the past we have had issues with a new autoconf version > > > > actually breaking the Python build, so we also need to test a new > > > > version > > > > before switching to it. > > > > > > Well, so I guess all committers will have to use the same > > > Linux/FreeBSD/whatever distribution then? > > > AFAICT there's no requirement regarding the mercurial version used by > > > committers either. > > > > Autoconf is a special case though. Different versions of autoconf > > produce wildly different outputs for 'configure', making it impossible > > to vet configure.ac changes by reviewing the configure diff. > > Isn't it enough to review the configure.ac diff? > That's the ideal but it's been wrong in the past and may possibly be wrong in the future as well.
Anecdotally, in the Linux distribution I package for we have a conversation about whether we should apply patches to configure.ac and then run autoreconf (or equivalent) or include the patches to ocnfigure about once a year. Although the latter has been pretty stable for several autoconf version updates enough people have bad memories of those times when bumping autoconf revisions that there's always a vocal contingent who advocate shipping patches to the actual configure scripts (they're under the impression the package maintainer will actually audit the configure patch that autoconf generated to see if there's breakage that way). -Toshio
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