Re: documentation of autoconf macros

[Brian Dessent]

Vincent Torri wrote:

> i'm usually using that doc:
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html
> 
> when I'm writing autofoo stuff. But there is no mention of the first
> version of autoconf when a macro appeared, and it sometimes annoyes me as
> I don't know which version of autoconf I have to request (the projects i'm
> working on can be run on old OS)
> 
> is there a plan to add such informations in the documentation ?

The version of autoconf only matters to the person (developer) who
creates the distribution tarball.  The generated configure script that
is shipped to the user is standalone.

So if you mean you have users with old systems, the version is
irrelevant because they don't need any version of autoconf installed at
all to configure and build from a source tarball.  Even if they have a
too-old version of autoconf installed, it still doesn't matter[1] as
they are just running the generated scripts in the tarball, not invoking
autoconf to rebuild them.  You as developer can insist on whatever
recent version of autoconf meets your needs, and still support users of
any vintage system.

The only time it matters is if you have co-developers on the project
with ancient systems that need to modify *.in/*.am/*.ac/*.m4.

And that aside, there is the NEWS file which pretty much tells you
exactly which macros were added and obsoleted in each autoconf release.

Brian

[1] Modulated of course by the user preserving the file timestamps of
the tarball (i.e. not using "cp" or NFS) and the presence or absence of
maintainer Makefile rules to rebuild generated files.