Re: autoconf-2.64 required?

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 8:04 AM, Daniel J Sebald<address@hidden> wrote:
>> Autoconf 2.64 is really very new; though by the time Octave 3.4 will
>> be released, it may already be widespread.
>> However, in this case apparently it's just m4_ifblank and m4_ifnblank
>> missing, so an easy remedy is to steal them out from autoconf 2.64 and
>> define them ourselves if they're not there:
>> http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/691545147aca
>>
>> this enables use of autoconf 2.63 for me.
>
> Wait a second...
>
> First, shouldn't a copyright notice be given if hunks of autoconf are moved
> into Octave?
>

Maybe. I don't think it's legally necessary (the copyright exists
whether stated or not), but probably a good practice, even in the case
of trivial few-liners. Note that I quoted Autoconf, however.

>
> Second, for years I've occassionally (well, more than occassionally) fallen
> behind in autoconf or some other tool and the only deference I got from the
> list was to "download the latest version of autoconf".  (autoconf is not
> that difficult to keep up to date.)  Now we start adding little hunks to
> work around this issue?  Avoiding using the new macro is fine, but pulling
> in patches seems bad practice.
>

Here, this strips the requirement down from 2.64 to at least 2.61.
2.64 was released really recently (late July) and John stated he had
no intent to enforce 2.64. Since the only missing macros are trivial,
this seemed the best solution to me. But feel free to suggest a patch.

> If anything, an expiration date (i.e., a note/date saying remove this a year
> or two from now) should be put on that hunk of code so that someone can take
> it out when it is extraneous.
>

How would you estimate the date? I quoted that those are macros from
Autoconf 2.64; which seems sufficient to decide whether it is OK to
delete. A FIXME markup should probably be there, though.

regards

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz