On 2010-10-13 08:00, Mark Wedel wrote:
On 10/12/10 10:09 AM, James Lopeman wrote:
This issue is the second time auto-junk has broken on invidious (up to date
centos 5.x ). Its a common OS on rented colo/virtual servers.
As an example centos uses libtool 1.5.22 ( June 2007 ). This is what
invidious
is using right now. I fixed mine with a new automake (1.11.1) and
autoconf(2.6.3).
I'm not sure how a developer is supposed to know what versions of things are
on all long release server OS's are, or what combo's are needed to work.
Yes - that is really the problem.
But I can also see where it is hard from a developer making these changes -
he
probably has recent versions of those utilities, and the changes made worked
on
that system, so it is hard to know what the minimum needs really are.
I do indeed have recent versions of these tools, but it is more confusing that
it broke at all. The test seemed pretty straight forward and I didn't find
anything indicating that I used some unsupported feature, I based the new file
on the python checking code we already had for this very purpose.
I did not commit the updated aclocal.m4 for this very reason. Since it showed
that lots of libtool code had changed. I don't have easy access to old
versions of the tools. Installing those system wide would probably be quite
tricky without completely breaking the system. Installing autotools/libtool
stuff outside standard paths never worked for me before (the tools seemed to
prefer calling the distro-installed ones anyway, even though the locally
installed ones were first in $PATH).
In some cases, the documentation may state that information. The GTK
documentation states pretty clearly when a particular function was added, so
if
you are using that, you can know the minimum version of GTK that is needed.
I don't know if the auto tools and like do that. But even if they do, it
could be tricky - you might see some configure file for some other project
and
say 'that is a good way of doing it' and copy/paste it - it is unlikely you
are
going to check the docs to see minimum revisions that are needed for those
features.
Very rarely does autotools documentation state when something was added.
At one point, a decision was made not to include files that are automatically
generated (makefiles, configure, etc) in SVN. That is a decision that is
still
the right one IMO, but does mean that these types of issues show up.
Then aclocal.m4, autoconf.h.in and a few more files should go away since they
are auto-generated.
I'm just not sure what a good solution is - but what we currently have right
now
doesn't seem that great.
/Arvid Norlander
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