Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v2 2/2] autotools: Remove the configure script and just use autoconf

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

>>> On 18.05.19 at 00:31, <alistair.francis@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Don't hardcode old versions of configure in the source code, instead
> let's just use autoconf to generate them.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Alistair Francis <alistair.francis@xxxxxxx>

For the record - I strongly disagree to this unless there's a general
movement in GNU projects towards such a model. All projects I work
with at least every now an then (binutils, gdb, gcc, glibc, and a few
less prominent others) are not, afaia, moving into this direction. (I
notice that git and make, for example, don't have it in their git trees,
but do have it in release tarballs.)

As an aside - this diffstat

> ---
>  .gitignore        |     5 +
>  configure         |  3618 ---------------
>  docs/configure    |  3427 --------------
>  stubdom/configure |  4870 -------------------
>  tools/configure   | 11080 --------------------------------------------
>  5 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 22995 deletions(-)

shows that you don't care to update any of the documentation at
all, yet I think such a change would almost certainly need to do so,
besides also making sure this gets pointed out in the next release's
release notes. There are also makefiles which point out that
./configure needs running first. Such error messages would also
need modification.

An by not updating documentation it also remains unclear
what the minimum autoconf version would be that's required. Yet
as pointed out in the earlier discussion, to be able to build on
older distros it is essential to know this (i.e. whether to first build
a more modern one there).

Jan



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