Re: [bug-mailutils] imap problem (quoting)

[Jeff Bailey]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 02:32:03PM +0000, Nic Ferrier wrote:

> Right now the problem is that you don't have a configure in your CVS
> and yet you require quite a high version of autoconf (version 2.56?).

I beleive that it's 2.54, which is the minimum required by Automake 1.7. 
I haven't looked in a while, though.

> I'm just trying to setup mailutils on a fresh debian box, but debian
> comes with autoconf 2.53. That version was quite a popular one because
> it was stable and good.

You'd need the whole autotools setup.  It's quite likely that we may
need to update to an even more recent version of autoconf so that we can
fix some other portabilty problems.

> So: WHY OH WHY can't the mailutils team keep a working configure in
> the repository?

Because we don't really commit to all using the same version of the
various autotools.  My experience is that then repositories tend to get
all sorts of incidental commits because one person will touch the file
with autoconf2.54 and another with autoconf2.57.  Except for running the
autogen.sh script once at a fresh checkout, I rarely think about when
the files are regenerated.

CVS is for developpers - and I beleive that it's reasonable to expect
all of the developpers to install the needed tools.  Because we're using
automake, we use the `make dist' (and a custom `make release') target
which produces snapshot tarballs with all of the generated files.

I could probably hack the nightly snapshot script to produce make
releases, instead of CVS checkouts.  Hmmm...  Lemme think for a bit
about how hairy that would be.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey