On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 11:08:00PM +1000, Martin Pool wrote:
> 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.
Ok, I understand the problem now.
> 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.
Hmm, I would have just installed the old version with a different
name, e.g. oldautoconf, and documented that the users may fall back to
these, if a program didn't like the new one. Shouldn't that work? I
don't like automatic stuff that makes strange assumptions about my
code. --- But ok, I am also the guy that has no old autoconf on his
systems, as I am of the opinion, the application must be fixed, not
the tool. People are free to disagree here. ;-)
> 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.
Yes, I think you're right here. I just didn't understand the problem
completely before.
Robert
--
Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2517
Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de
- application/pgp-signature attachment: stored
Received on Wed Sep 25 16:35:22 2002