Re: Autoconf 2.69 update

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 4:31 AM, Oskari Saarenmaa <os(at)ohmu(dot)fi> wrote:
> ISTM autoconf has been better with backwards compatibility lately. Maybe the
> fatal error could be changed to a warning and/or the check for version ==
> 2.63 be replaced with a check for version >= 2.63? Without a strict
> requirement for a certain autoconf version it would make sense to also drop
> the built autoconf artifacts from the git repository which would make diffs
> shorter and easier to review when touching configure.in.

-1 from me. Dropping configure from the repository would
significantly increase the burden to compile and install PostgreSQL
from source. Not everyone has autoconf installed.

-1 also for loosening the version check. I guarantee that if we do
that, people will use varying versions when regenerating configure,
and we'll have a mess. Even if we standardize the version committers
are supposed to use, someone will foul it up at least twice a year.
The last thing I need is to have more things that I can accidentally
screw up while committing; the list is too long already.

I realize that those checks are a bit of a nuisance, but if they
bother you you can just whack them out locally and proceed. Or else
you can download and compile the right version of autoconf. If you're
doing sufficiently serious development that you need to touch
configure.in, the 5 minutes it takes you to build a local install of
the right autoconf version should be the least of your concerns. It's
not hard; I've done it multiple times, and have multiple versions of
autoconf installed on those systems where I need to be able to re-run
autoconf on any supported branch.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company