[crossfire] broken configure on opensolaris

[Mark Wedel]

On 10/12/10 10:09 AM, James Lopeman wrote:
> This issue is the second time auto-junk has broken on invidious (up to date
> centos 5.x ). Its a common OS on rented colo/virtual servers.
>
> As an example centos uses libtool 1.5.22 ( June 2007 ). This is what invidious
> is using right now. I fixed mine with a new automake (1.11.1) and
> autoconf(2.6.3).
>
> I'm not sure how a developer is supposed to know what versions of things are
> on all long release server OS's are, or what combo's are needed to work.

  Yes - that is really the problem.

  But I can also see where it is hard from a developer making these changes - he 
probably has recent versions of those utilities, and the changes made worked on 
that system, so it is hard to know what the minimum needs really are.

  In some cases, the documentation may state that information.  The GTK 
documentation states pretty clearly when a particular function was added, so if 
you are using that, you can know the minimum version of GTK that is needed.

  I don't know if the auto tools and like do that.  But even if they do, it 
could be tricky - you might see some configure file for some other project and 
say 'that is a good way of doing it' and copy/paste it - it is unlikely you are 
going to check the docs to see minimum revisions that are needed for those features.

At one point, a decision was made not to include files that are automatically 
generated (makefiles, configure, etc) in SVN.  That is a decision that is still 
the right one IMO, but does mean that these types of issues show up.

I'm just not sure what a good solution is - but what we currently have right now 
doesn't seem that great.