Requiring newer autoconf for X.Org packages?

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 9/12/22 22:32, Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia wrote:
>> On Aug 30, 2022, at 14:42, Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
>> We document autoconf 2.62 as the minimum release required in:
>> https://www.x.org/wiki/Building_the_X_Window_System/
>> and most modules have AC_PREREQ([2.60]).  If I recall correctly, a decade ago
>> we didn't want to force use of autoconf 2.65 or later since some vendors were
>> still uncertain at that time about those newer version being under GPLv3 - is
>> that still a problem for anyone?
> 
> That was mainly a problem for me (well, Apple) for a while.  This is no longer an issue for XQuartz, so I am supportive of this change if it helps out NetBSD.

Thanks - since no one said this would be a problem for them, and since I just
broke NetBSD builds by accidentally generating the libX11-1.8.4 tarballs with
autoconf 2.69 instead of 2.71, I've opened an MR for this:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11/-/merge_requests/187

and verified it would have stopped me making that mistake.

If there are indeed folks out there who really want a non-GPLv3 build
system, I encourage you to help with our (slowly) ongoing efforts to
convert the X.Org packages to build with the Apache-2.0 licensed meson
build system instead.

-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris