[Python-Dev] Bumping autoconf from 2.68 to 2.69

[Trent Nelson]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 02:17:35AM -0700, Charles-François Natali wrote:
> > It should be sufficient to install autoconf-x.y into /home/user/bin or
> > something similar. Installing autoconf from source really takes about
> > 3 minutes.
> 
> Well, maybe, maybe not.
> autoconf depends on a least m4 and Perl, and you may very well have a
> compatibility issue here.
> That's why most distributions have package managers, and in 2012 we're
> past the './configure && make && make install".

    If you're unable to get 2.69 (or whatever) installed for whatever
    reason, you can always just commit configure.ac and ask another
    committer to regenerate configure with the correct version.

    (In my case, I couldn't find a single Snakebite box that had 2.68
     installed; out of 20-something hosts, everything had 2.69, which
     is partly why I'd like to bump to 2.69.)

> > It doesn't matter which OS or Mercurial version a developer uses as
> > they don't implicitly affect any versioned resources; autoconf does.
> 
> If you're worried about the noise in diff, it's never been a problem
> at least to me (just don't post a configure diff for review, the
> configure.ac is enough).
> 
> If you're worried about runtime compatibility, then autoconf is not
> your only worry. Proper build also depends on the target shell, target
> toolchain (gcc, libc, etc).

    Ignoring diff noise, what I'm suggesting is that we formalize the
    version used to build configure, as opposed to just accepting that
    "configure was built with whatever arbitrary version of autoconf
    the last developer that modified configure.ac had installed".

    If you look at configure's history, we pretty much already follow
    this informally.

    Anyway, back to the original question: does anyone know of reasons
    we shouldn't bump to 2.69?  Any known incompatibilities?

        Trent.