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Re: Skip all version checks with autoconf?


From: Warren Young
Subject: Re: Skip all version checks with autoconf?
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2018 10:43:56 -0600

On Aug 25, 2018, at 10:23 AM, Basin Ilya <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> I have a VM with RHEL 6.8, because that's what our customers build our 
> software on. And when I change anything in configure.ac, I test it there.
> Of course, such conservative attitude is unnecessary for open source 
> projects, but supporting four year old autotools looks reasonable.

Any open source project should know its audience.  I run one where we maintain 
compatibility with software up to about 10-12 years old, just because it’s that 
sort of project.  Consequently, new releases get tested on a CentOS 5 box, even 
though that’s “unsupported” by the distro and its upstream.

It sounds like the developers of the software project the OP is currently 
fighting with don’t understand that they have users not out on the bleeding 
edge with themselves.  He should be getting that message to them, not blaming 
Autotools.

Version numbers, properly used, are not “useless.”  See 

    https://semver.org/

for one particularly well thought out argument.

Done properly, a good version numbering system lets users make correct 
inferences about what a given version change means.  That’s highly useful.

The trick is getting developers to declare their versioning system’s meanings 
and to stick to it.


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