On May 24, 2008, at 10:46 AM, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:

> On Sat, May 24, 2008, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>
>> I'm all in favor of using the latest & greatest for development.
>>
>> However, there are legacy needs building rpm from CVS.
>
> Can you be more specific, Jeff? The only needs I can imagine is  
> that an
> RPM 5 _developer_ like you wants to build HEAD on an ancient  
> system. If
> this is the case, ok, we can add some workarounds for this. But  
> regular
> users in legacy situations should use the official RPM 5 tarballs and
> for those one doesn't need a locally installed Libtool. Also keep in
> mind that for just building RPM 5 on an ancient platform you could use
> "devtool standalone" where the latest GNU libtool is available. So,
> we are really talking about the situation that someone like you is 1.
> building RPM from CVS, 2. on an older platform, 3. without "devtool
> standalone", right? Puhhh... ok, I'll look how we can add some  
> seamless
> support for this situation into the autogen.sh scripts. What  
> particular
> version of ancient Libtool are you faced with? 1.5.x?
>

Sure I can be specific.

And sure I could use devtool builds (I likely would), if
I did not have to guarantee no Fedora yum breakage with rpm-5.x.

I have daily reports of problems from non-devtool environments that
I have to sort out, most of which WORKFORME (i.e. no reproducer),
and latest libtool (and gettext) requirements for RPM just get in
the way trying to identify a reproducer so that I can fix.

I use a Fedora 9 (which isn't exactly "old") platform which provides

$ rpm -q libtool
libtool-1.5.24-6.fc9.i386

As a developer I don't mind editing out --quiet ... --install when  
needed,
that's a one time cost (although I'm almost certainly gonna embarass  
myself
by accidently checking in the hackery).

But in order to try to reproduce problems on user boxen, I'd like it  
to be easier
to build rpm from CVS. There's a whole spectrum of "users", not just  
the disjoint
sets of developers (like me) and end-users (who should be using  
binary or
released RPM software).

Yes its a silly/tedious tool issue ...

73 de Jeff