Re: [TCLCORE] [Tcl-bugs] tcl-cvs: "tcl/unix configure.in" modified

[Donal K. F. <don...@ma...>]

Daniel A. Steffen wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 13:09, Jan Nijtmans <jan...@gm...> wrote:
>> 2009/1/3 Daniel A. Steffen <da...@us...>:
>>> (in particular compatible with autoconf 2.61, which some insist on using even though it was decided we could not switch to it yet...)
> 
> to clarify, the fix in question was for compatibility with 2.61 _and
> later_, I wasn't advocating using 2.61 specifically.
> Last time we discussed updating past autoconf 2.59, there was
> opposition to the idea (c.f. bug tracker, re uintptr_t detection
> IIRC).
> FWIW I'm perfectly happy to stay at 2.59, it's trivial to install it
> locally if your system only has a later version...
> what I would like to see however is that everybody stick to the
> version we decide on, if you look at the recent history of
> tcl/unix/configure, it is full of 2000 line diffs from repeated
> back-and-forth between 2.61 and 2.59...

Generally speaking, configure is a generated file and so should never be
edited directly anyway, so big diffs aren't a big problem...

But I admit I'm probably responsible for quite a bit of the use of 2.61,
mostly because I've lost access to the machines I was using that had
2.59 on them. (Theoretically I can get onto others, but I've yet to
identify which to switch to; our clusters are rather complex...) I
operate on the principle that, most of the time, it's better to have a
fix at all rather than to leave broken for want of the exact version.
Yes, that does mean that a rebuild of 'configure' before release is
indeed a good idea...

(Rhetorical question: Why doesn't autoconf provide a way to configure
what the default @datarootdir@ is?)

Donal.