I understand, thanks for the explanation. We will wait to see what other maintainers and upstreams will say.

This explanation is exactly what we need to have as much information as we can. Hopefully other maintainers will soonly present their opinions as well.

Thanks.

Ondrej

On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 5:51 PM Brian C. Lane <bcl@redhat.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 07:55:09AM +0100, Ondrej Dubaj wrote:
> Brian,
>
> I understand, but as I already said, compat package can lead to
> unwillingness to move forward to autoconf-2.71. For example, we can have a
> compat package for f35 to have time to deal with the problems, but
> certainly not for f36 or f37. After release of autoconf-2.71, I expect most
> of the upstream packages moving to autoconf-2.71 in one year time, so
> hopefully no compat package will be needed.

I think you are optimistic :)

>
> Why are you not thinking of moving parted to autoconf-2.71 ? Are there any
> special reasons for not doing this?

Nobody else is using it yet. Ubuntu, Debian, Alpine, and FreeBSD (and I'm
pretty sure the other *BSD flavors) are still using 2.69. The Gentoo has
it available, as does the Debian experimental branch but it doesn't look
like they are ready for general use yet.

We (the parted maintainers) need to make sure that parted remains
buildable for all the users of it, not just Fedora, so it can't switch
until 2.71 is widely available and is well tested. I have a big patch
that seems to work, but that's going to make patching difficult for me
until upstream is ready to switch so I'd rather just stick with 2.69

There needs to be a period of overlap to allow upstreams to experiment
with the new version.

Brian

--
Brian C. Lane (PST8PDT) - weldr.io - lorax - parted - pykickstart