Required Autotools Versions

[Dan Nicholson]

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.

2. Patch the required version's in glib's configure.ac. I have pretty
good confidence that it would continue to work with the Xorg autotools
versions, but I don't really have the old versions to test with. It's
also obviously risky to be building glib in an essentially untested
configuration.

If no one has any objections, I'd like to go with option 1. Let me
know if you feel strongly about this.

--
Dan