[Nagiosplug-devel] Re: How would upgrading autoconf & automake go down?

[Ton Voon]

On 14 Dec 2004, at 09:29, Yves wrote:

>> However, one thing I've noticed is that I get errors with autoconf
>> v2.57, so this means the dependency is now on autoconf v2.58. Also, I
>> am using automake v1.6.3 while the automake dependency is v1.6 in the
>> dev guidelines - I haven't installed the older version to test.
>>
>> Before I commit, I wanted some opinions - is it worth making these
>> changes and force us using newer GNU tools?
>
> My experience with perfparse, where the dependancy is still 2.5X for 
> autoconf, but 1.6
> for automake :
> The users don't need autoconf and automake : they just need to run 
> configure. So your
> question concerns only developers.
> As a developer, I would say that recompiling a partial GNU environment 
> including
> autoconf and automake is possible on most systems. But developers 
> should always have the
> newer tools to develop (and old configs to test)
> I agree with your question to force or not developers to recompile a 
> GNU environment if
> they don't have it already.
>
> But I prefer this question : who, and on what systems, would have to 
> upgrade the
> development tools ?
>
> Lynne Lawrence already answered it for Solaris>=8 users : it's OK.
> Mandrake, Fedora, Suse (and others) Linux users are probably OK with 
> their recent Linux.
> Darwin (MacOSX) users with fink : OK too.
>
> What about RHES and other older Redhat systems ?
> What about Debian Woody users (do they all have a more recent linux 
> for developing ?)
> What about HPUX, AIX, *BSD and other users ?
>

After a few days, the votes so far are: 2 for (Stanley and Lynne) and 1 
undecided (Yves). As it is only developers that would be affected, and 
I'd expect developers to be able to update their own GNU tools, I've 
decided to go ahead, so the changes are now committed. I'll update the 
docs too with the new requirement of autoconf 2.58.

I've tested on MacOSX, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD on the SF compile farm 
and they all seem to compile fine (there's a problem with check_icmp on 
Solaris 9 - can anyone look into that one?). So I think this is going 
to be okay. Let me know if problems develop.

Thanks for the opinions.

Ton