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Re: Request to revert the C version change


From: Zack Weinberg
Subject: Re: Request to revert the C version change
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2020 12:09:50 -0500

On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 11:54 AM Ross Burton <ross@burtonini.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Dec 2020 at 16:46, Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> wrote:
>> This patch is already in Gnulib since 2020-12-09. But when people
>> run 'autoreconf' on an existing released tarball, they are effectively
>> combining an older Gnulib with a newest Autoconf.
>>
>> Why do people do that? The point of tarballs is that you can run
>> './configure' right away.
>>
>> If people want to modify the build infrastructure, it would often be
>> more reasonable to start off the git repository of the package (possibly
>> from a specific release tag or release branch).
>
> Because it’s not uncommon to need newer config.status, or updated m4 files, 
> or to patch Makefile.am or configure.ac.

Also, in my experience downstream redistributors prefer to work from
tarballs, for several different reasons: tarballs tend to come with
more provenance information (e.g. PGP signatures); working from a git
checkout may require any number of unusual tools that aren't required
for tarball releases; figuring out exactly which git commit
corresponds to a tarball is often more difficult than it ought to be;
and so on.

I'm not happy about needing to kludge backward compatibility with the
older std-gnu11.m4 into autoconf 2.70.1 but I'm going to do it.

zw



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