Required Autotools Versions

[Dan Nicholson]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Dan Nicholson <dbn.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been wanting to clean up the autotools files for a while, and
> there's a bug (#343820) with a patch, too. I've been a little wary
> about bumping up the required versions of the tools. Unfortunately,
> the bundled glib seems to have done it for us since we're using a
> tagged snapshot from git. Even if we used a tarball, I muck around
> quite a bit with glib's autotools files to slim things down, so we
> have to regenerate them anyway. The required versions from glib and
> what Javier has proposed in his patch are:
>
> autoconf-2.62
> automake-1.10
> libtool-2.2
>
> The other project that I've been involved in that has a pretty strict
> autotools policy is Xorg. It uses these versions:
>
> autoconf-2.60
> automake-1.10
> libtool-1.5
>
> The options would seem to be:
>
> 1. Stick with glib's versions. All of those versions have been
> released for at least a few years (autoconf-2.62 = 2008-04-08,
> automake-1.10 = 2006-10-15, libtool-2.2 = 2008-03-01), so they should
> be found on pretty much any host we'd want pkg-config to be built on.
> The one that's a little scary is libtool. We don't have any real
> reason within pkg-config to require anything above libtool-1.5.

I decided to do this since it was easiest. It turns out glib has
automake-1.11, but that was released 2008-05-17. All the packages have
been out at least 3 years, and that seems ample enough.

--
Dan