[cairo] Invoking autogen.sh in non-english locales

[Carl Worth]

On Sun, 15 Aug 2004 11:03:44 +0100, James Henstridge wrote:
> On 14/08/04 14:36, Carl Worth wrote:
> >Meanwhile, I'm not sure if the version checks are properly set at the
> >minimum working version. For example, a user of Mac OS X just reported
> >that the version checks fail with the dfault automake there (1.6.3?). Is
> >anyone in a position to check if that was a false negative, and if so,
> >to back up automake_min_version? Thanks.
> >
> If you want more full featured checks, you may as well swipe the 
> gnome-autogen.sh script from gnome-common. You could then rewrite the 
> cairo autogen script like this:

I don't want more full-featured checks. I'd prefer to have no checks
whatsoever.

What I want is a build system that "just works" for as many reasonable
systems as possible. To get this I'm willing to accept some pain and
forgo some features in latest-and-greatest automake for example.

And I don't think we're there currently--the version checks in
autogen.sh seems to be causing false negatives.

I hit a false negative with automake 1.6 on a Mac OS X/fink box
recently. And today, a very vanilla Debian/unstable also failed to make
it through autogen.sh due to having version 1.4 of automake. I have no
idea why Debian is giving me that version, but I disabled the check and
it seemed to build just fine.

So, can someone remind me why we added these version checks? Are they
doing more good than the harm I've been hitting? I'm planning to back
the check up to require only automake 1.4, but I'm getting tempted to
rip the checks out completely.

-Carl