Autoconf 2.60
Wheeler, Kyle Bruce
What do people think about dropping support for old versions of autoconf? In particular, I'm thinking of moving the autoconf requirement from 2.59 (released in 2003) to 2.60 (released in 2006).
A bunch of things happened in 2.60 that makes life easier; we currently cart around back-ported versions of AC_PROG_CC_C99, AC_PROG_SED, and AC_USE_SYSTEM_EXTENSIONS, and we cannot use AS_CASE... all of these things are relatively minor annoyances, but maintaining support means doing backwards compatibility testing with every point release... something that will begin to be a little more difficult as the systems I have access to all get upgraded. The only reason I was maintaining that backward compatibility was for out-of-the-box support of MacOS X 10.4 and RHEL 5, neither of which are machines I have easy access to anymore.
Keep in mind: this is only an issue for developers. Users of the release tarballs do *NOT* need to install *any* version of autoconf (or any of the other autotools).
Anyway, any objections to changing the requirement?
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Kyle B. Wheeler
Dept. 1423: Scalable System Software
Sandia National Laboratories
505-844-0394