Re: Trunk r117046 fails on systems with older automake

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> At some point, 1.11 was the requirement, and newer versions would
> fail.

I don't remember that ever happening. It would be an unusual state of
affairs.

> If you can promise prominent failures, that's okay, too.

I can promise that. autogen.sh will just say "your XX is too old".

>  (Evidently, at least in this case, it was not so clear-cut, for
> reasons we still don't understand.)

Because we did not get a proper bug report. (Juanma's mail refers to a
different issue/revision than Andy's "it doesn't work" email.)

> I'm afraid of subtle failures which can go unnoticed for a long time.

I don't think you need to be afraid of that.

> I don't have a luxury of doing jobs that are not strictly necessary,
> and don't recommend that others use versions I don't use myself, or
> upgrade when there's no real need.  Besides, which version to upgrade
> to? it's not like you can promise to which version we will switch
> next, can you?

If I were you, I would have built "most recent stable version" at the
time you built autotools, not "bare minimum that Emacs requires, even if
it's several years old". So just hop in your time machine and go back
and build a different version to start with... ;)