Re: Fw: [Lifelines-dev] [HEADS-UP] - changes to the CVS repositoryarecoming

[Matthew E. <ma...@gs...>]

> Quoting Marc Nozell (ma...@no...):
>
> > > Actually, I'm going to revert my below decision.  The only people who
need
> > > to be building LL with the GNU toolset are active developers.  Right
now,
> > > that's a very small number of people (mainly Perry.)    It's a
reasonable
> > > requirement to ask active developers to use the most up-to-date
version of
> > > the GNU tools, as it makes many things easier (especially with
autoconf and
> > > gettext integration.)
> >
> > I'd ask you to reconsider since it makes it difficult for other people
> > to become active developers.  For example people that want to track
> > the debian distribution.
> >
> > Would the debian packager for lifelines care to comment?
>
> If I understand the context, yes..:-)
>
> As far as I understand, the question is : should the requirement for
> autotools be abandoned in LL?

Close, but not quite.  The question is whether or not LL should require
newer versions of autotools (autoconf 2.53, automake 1.5) and GNU libraries
(gettext 0.11) or only require the lowest
common-across-all-supported-platforms version of tools (autoconf 2.13,
automake 1.4, gettext 0.10).

I believe Perry has been using some of the newer featuers in gettext 0.11
since it makes his life easier when developing for i18n.
I like using the newer autotools since it makes my life easier, as autoconf
2.53 integrates more nicely with gettext and autoconf 2.53 / automake 1.5
can do more for me.

Marc's concern is that by requiring the newest version of autotools, we're
turning developers away because these version may not be the default
installed versions on their platforms.  (Indeed, it seems like FreeBSD and
Mac OS X are the only platforms using autoconf 2.53 -- all of the Linux
distros are still using 2.13).  I contend that this isn't the case -
precompiled packages of the newer tools are available for Debian and Red
Hat, which just about covers the Linux side of the equation.

--
Matt Emmerton