Re: please bring back program suffix for autoconf bin files

[Dan Kegel]

Mike Castle wrote:
> > Autoconf people, it would be very helpful if autoconf
> > instituted versioning support, i.e. a way for build
> > scripts and the like to specify which version of autoconf
> > to use. ...
>
> I'm not sure I understand why this is such an issue.
>
> When building from source, one rarely changes needs to make patches to
> configure.{in,ac} and then run autotools*.  And I have a tool that builds
> my entire linux system from scratch, and I pretty much live bleeding edge
> on EVERYTHING.

You don't cross-compile for embedded CPUs, I bet :-)
That's what makes me need to muck with autoconf stuff so much;
many packages need patches to make them cross-compile-friendly.

> If you're building packages for distribution, you pretty much MUST use a
> chroot environment anyway to be sure you're using known versions of libc,
> binutils, gcc, rather than whatever may be installed on the system.  Apply
> the same to autoconf.

Sure, I could, and maybe I will.  But all I need is access to
a recent autoconf side by side with the old autoconf-2.13.
All the distros make autoconf available as /usr/bin/autoconf,
but the name they use for autoconf-2.13 varies:

Red Hat 8.x: /usr/bin/autoconf-2.13
Debian:      /usr/bin/autoconf2.13
Mandrake:    /usr/bin/autoconf-2.13
Cygwin:      /usr/autotool/stable/bin/autoconf

How painful would it be for the autoconf maintainers to declare the following?

-----------------------------------------------------------
  Linux distributors are encouraged to make autoconf-2.13
  available as the executable
       /usr/bin/autoconf-2.13
-----------------------------------------------------------

That's all it would take to make things easy for people like me.

Myself, I'll just make that symlink myself while I'm waiting for Debian
and Cygwin to wise up.
- Dan