Re: debbugs, and a FAQ, for Autotools

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 22:30 +0100, Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
> That Linux distributions usually come with a good set of autotools is 
> irrelevant, since in my understanding all developers of *one* project 
> should work with the *same* autotools versions. Of course, the project
> might also compile otherwise on different systems, but using the same 
> version of autotools everywhere reduces (needless) incompatibility 
> issues between developers and increases acceptance of autotools. No?

This is very important IF you check in the outputs of the autotools into
your source repository.  If you do that, and people use different
versions of autotools, then you're constantly getting a "ping-pong"
effect with these files as different developers check in different
versions.

My opinion has always been that those are object files, not source
files, and just as you'd not typically check in a .o into your source
repository, so you wouldn't check in the output of autotools.  Because
of that it doesn't matter to me which version of autotools other people
use.

The downside of the approach I use is that anyone who wants to build
from the source repository has to go get copies of the autotools and
install them first.  I prefer this option anyway, as I think developers
need those tools, but other teams may have other preferences.