Re: autogen.sh instructions suggestion

On 25 Sep 2002, Robert Schiele <rschiele@uni-mannheim.de> wrote:

> > Simply invoking this way fixes the problem:
> >
> > ~/work/subversion/trunk% AUTOCONF=autoconf2.50 sh ./autogen.sh
> >
> > I'd like to suggest that in INSTALL (or some other document) you tell
> > Debian users to do this.
>
> Shouldn't this be documented within Debian sid then? As this problem
> will occur then with _all_ sources that rely on autoconf 2.50.

No, it won't occur with all sources.

On Debian, "autoconf" is a wrapper that tries to detect whether a
particular configure.in requires 2.13 or 2.50. As far as I can
determine, it seems to decide that APR only needs 2.13, and Subversion
needs 2.50. That may be corrrect. However Subversion's configure
script seems to assume that APR has been built with the same version
of autoconf, and so it breaks when it tries to recursively invoke
apr/configure. Likewise for apr-util. Packages that call each
other's configure scripts, and where one requires >=2.50 and one
>=2.13 are probably a rare case.

I agree that Debian's handling of this is a bit crufty, although
perhaps the least evil way of handling the messy upgrade situation in
autoconf. I think there is a bug open to that effect.

However, regardless of what you think of Debian, I think Subversion
would be doing no harm, and would be helping its users, to add this
suggestion to the documentation.

-- 
Martin 
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