Re: Autoconf and CVS

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2006, Stepan Kasal wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 24, 2005 at 10:26:10AM -0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > In some cases most of the project developers don't want to have
> > anything to do with build maintenance.  They just want to edit
> > existing C/C++ source code.
>
> This is natural.  But they might want to add a new source file, ...
> I must be annoying to ask "the autotools expert" to do it for them.
>
> It's much better to keep the primary condition and the bootstrap script
> working, so that every user can install a reasonably recent autotools
> and bootstrap the project himself.  In the days of Automake 1.4 and 1.5,
> there were problems with compatibility between different versions of
> Automake, but that has been solved several years ago.

It must be nice to have such a simple project. :-)

For my own project, released autoconf and automake have been fine, but 
released libtool has never been quite good enough.  So for many years, 
I have used hand-tweaked versions of CVS libtool.  I can't expect the 
other developers to reproduce the libtool I am using.  Libtool is 
getting better and better so I expect that eventually it will become 
good enough that using the latest released libtool will be sufficient. 
As a result, the project uses "maintainer mode" and generated files 
are in CVS.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/