[parted-devel] Parted bootstrap - logic error when comparing version numbers

[Jim Meyering]

Otavio Salvador wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Jim Meyering <jim at meyering.net> wrote:
>> Otavio Salvador wrote:
>>> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Curtis Gedak <gedakc at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Recently I acquired the latest GIT repository for parted (1.8.8.1.115-d53a)
>>>> and have discovered a problem with building the program.
>>>>
>>>> The problem is that an 'automake' version >= 1.10a is required.  I am using
>>>> 1.10.1, which I believe would be >= 1.10a.
>>
>> No.  1.10.1 is *older* than 1.10a.
>> And automake-1.10b was recently released, which I consider to be
>> stable enough that I used it to bootstrap the stable release
>> of upstream coreutils-7.2.
>
> I see but while I also think we should stay up to date with the development
> environment I think we should also avoid bumping a version requirement
> without a very good reason.
>
>>> I've pushed a change to require 1.10 only since 1.10a was an alpha
>>> version of it.
>>
>> It would be better to encourage developers to use a newer version
>> of automake, since what is now called 1.10b appears to be quite
>> close to what automake-1.11 will be.
>
> That blocks parted to be build with current distribution versions as
> for example the Debian one. Without a very good reason for it, I'm
> opposed to it.

IMHO, upstream should not be beholden to distribution versions
of automake when they're stuck at 1.10.1 which is over a year old.
By that argument, depending on which distro you choose, we'd never
be able to use newer tools.

Besides, there are several desirable features in automake-1.10b
for which I intend to switch parted:

  silent-rules
  parallel-tests
  dist-xz support

and maybe one or two others, not counting all of the bug fixes.

If you require to be able to build using some older version of automake,
you can build from a patched branch or even from a release tarball,
at which point the version of automake doesn't even matter.

Developers can be expected to be able to install a recent automake,
even from git, although that would be exceptional.