Removal of libtool-2.4 in favor of libtool-2.2, why?

[Ade Lovett]

On Jan 11, 2011, at 16:21 , Andrew W. Nosenko wrote:
> Can I ask autotool's maintainer(s) (sorry, it hard to determine
> human's name from autotools@ alias) to upgrade devel/libtool from
> libtool-2.2 to libtool-2.4 and, as consequence and for completeness,
> libltdl-2.2 to libtool-2.4?

1.  devel/libtool24 (and devel/libltdl24) were never integrated into the ports tree

2.  as is usual with these things, a whole bunch of stuff tends to break on each update, requiring numerous experimental runs to determine and fix issues (don't even _ask_ about gnu make 3.81->3.82)

3.  not everything that uses libtool also uses autoconf

4.  a whole bunch of other work was doing to clean up massive over-infestation of autotools versions, leaving us with a legacy and a current version for autoconf/automake, and a lot less intrusive (in terms of the ports tree itself) patching in the future

5.  there was absolutely no way to get another set of experimental runs in for the libtool 2.2->2.4 conversion before ...

6.  ... the ports freeze we are now in for 7.4 and 8.2, during which time no infrastructural and sweeping changes are permitted to give us some chance at generating a full package set for these releases

7.  even limited local testing shows that libtool-2.4 is not backwards-compatible with 2.2.x (there's a shocker)

8.  we're not human;  even if we were at some point, after dealing with this stuff, not a chance.

So, yes, it'll eventually happen;  no, it won't happen immediately;  yes, it'll most likely happen soon(tm) after 7.4 and 8.2;  yes, it'll definitely be a painful and annoying process as always.

-aDe