Re: Automake-installed auxiliary scripts can get silently out-of-date after an Automake upgrade

[Bruno Haible]

Eric Blake wrote:
> > Any idea for a simple solution to this problem?
> 
> Aren't there timestamps in the auxiliary scripts for a reason?  If a
> script is updated as part of a new automake release, can't automake
> insert some sanity checks to see if the currently-installed scripts have
> too old of a timestamp

Yes, this is basically what I would expect "automake -Wall" to do.

But the timestamp is not the right thing to compare. There are lots of
changes to the 'missing' file that did not make it backward incompatible.
I would therefore do something similar as done in libtool [1]: Introduce
a formal "invocation API stamp". It is a number (1, 2, 3, ...) with the
property that if two versions of 'missing' have the same stamp they obey
the same invocation conventions.

Then extend "automake -Wall" to compare the invocation API stamp of the
copy in the current package with the invocation API stamp of the script
that comes with libtool and emit a warning if they disagree.

Bruno

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/html_node/Versioning.html