[136318] trunk/dports/devel/autoconf/Portfile

[Lawrence Velázquez]

On May 14, 2015, at 3:43 PM, David Evans <devans at macports.org> wrote:

> I understand what you're saying, but this seems to me to be in the
> category of fixing things that aren't broken.  In addition, it
> complicates maintenance by opening us up to perl version specific
> problems on the various platforms, particularly older ones.
> 
> I would favor depending not on the system perl or perl5 but use the
> default perl (currently perl5.16).  This is in line with our general
> perl guidelines and ensures consistent behavior on all platforms
> regardless of the system perl version.

I agree with this policy 99.9% of the time, but I think autoconf merits
an exemption:

- As the maintainer, I of course take responsibility for any issues that
  arise. I have access to systems with Leopard through Yosemite and have
  not seen any regressions or inconsistencies due to this change.
- I want devs to be able to add "use_autoconf" or "use_autoreconf" to
  their ports if necessary without worrying about the relatively large
  Perl dependency. I would like to liberate Automake also, but I haven't
  looked into it yet.
- It's very widely used.
- It's a relatively small application.
- It's updated infrequently, so I don't expect any disruptive changes.
  The repository only has 11 commits since the beginning of the year.
- Even Tiger has a new enough Perl.

vq