Re: expected Autoconf 2.59 <-> 2.60 compatibility?

[Noah Misch]

On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 05:26:12PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> Autoconf 2.50 was a major change, with a long development cycle,
> that had plenty of incompatibility with older releases, so that
> when I packaged it for Debian I kept a compatibility package
> around for Autoconf 2.13.  This seems to be what other distros
> and operating systems did as well.
> 
> Autoconf 2.60 has had a long development cycle too, but I'm
> hoping that it is not sufficiently different from 2.59 to make it
> necessary to package it separately from 2.59.  I'm basing this
> mostly on the NEWS, which primarily lists new macros.  However,
> it does list some behavioral changes as well, e.g. the change in
> the expansion of @top_builddir@ and the behavior of
> AC_SUBST_FILE.
> 
> Does anyone have input on whether these changes are cumulatively
> important enough to break much software?

We tried to preserve compatibility fairly well.  If a change broke several
existing `configure.ac', I would rather fix the problem and release Autoconf
2.61 than recommend dual distribution of Autoconf 2.59 and Autoconf 2.60.