Re: backward compatability of tools

[Dr. David Kirkby]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> 
> "Thomas E. Dickey" <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > changes were made to autoconf
> 
> What changes are you talking about, exactly?
> 
> > which made it incompatible with known, widely-used versions of
> > Bourne shell
> 
> Which versions of the Bourne shell are you talking about here, exactly?
> And which softare installations are broken as a result of the changes
> you're talking about?
> 
> The evidence so far is that nobody uses SunOS 4.x to install new
> software any more.  So these versions are not widely-used.  Perhaps
> you're thinking about some other versions.

I can't answer for Thomas, but as the originator of this thread I
would say the machine I had trouble with was a Sun SPARCstation 20
with a single SM61 CPU. It had a default install of SunOs 4.1.4. No
patches were added, no bash was added. gcc-2.0 and a bison of that era
was built on the system. 

Please from now on count me out of this argument. It is clear the
current developers don't feel the need for such backward compatibility
and will never be persuaded otherwise, so it's pointless to let it
drag on and on. 

If anyone would help me with using autoconf 2.53 on a newer system
(Sun Ultra 80 running Solaris 9), I would appreciate some help in
future, but I feel this particular argument has dragged on too long
and wish to take no further part in it. 

-- 
Dr. David Kirkby,
Senior Research Fellow,
Department of Medical Physics,
University College London,
11-20 Capper St, London, WC1E 6JA.
Tel: 020 7679 6408 Fax: 020 7679 6269
Internal telephone: ext 46408
e-mail address@hidden