bug#31262: makefile = 1.14, when I have 1.15

[Mike Frysinger]

On Wed, 25 Apr 2018 21:02:49 -0500, Eric Blake wrote:
> But yes, it would also be nice if automake didn't bake in quite such a
> version correlation between rules in a Makefile generated by an older
> version of automake when coupled with rerunning a newer automake because
> a Makefile.am changed.

i'm not sure this trade-off is worth the effort.  sure, it'd be nice, but
it'd be non-trivial to make sure backwards compat is maintained, and no one
would really ever test it.

we could do something like gettext where every release bundles all previous
versions and then selects the "right" one on the fly.  but for distros that
patch things, that'll get messy too.  and how many previous versions should
we bundle ?

some distros make it easy to install multiple versions in parallel.  Gentoo
for example has automake-X.Y so devs can pick the right one for their setup,
with a common "automake" tool that detects the version used in the source
tree and runs the corresponding version if available.  maybe we could make
that a more formal project ?

we could also make it easier for distros to install multiple versions in
parallel.  the current info page logic doesn't make this easy.