Do you think that's a real problem? The macros distributed with version foolib-1.17 ought to work with some older and later foolib versions (e.g by the popular method of invoking some foo-config program).
If a later version of foolib makes incompatible changes to the detection mechanism so that the old macros won't work, that can be dealt with just like other incompatible changes in the library which happen from time to time.
And if foo-config compatibility breaks a lot more often then foo-compatibility in general, then the natural conclusion is that the advertised m4 macros are broken and one's probably better off writing one's own macros.
/ Niels Möller ()
Previous text:
2002-09-30 17:49: Subject: Autoconf macros and aclocal
The drawback with that approach is that bug fixes and extensions to the m4 macros in the upstream source doesn't get used unless someone manually updates them in pike. I don't think it's a problem to use them directly; we must probably ensure that the machine(s) that build the distributed source dists have a complete build environment anyway. The problem is rather to recover gracefully when someone builds from cvs for personal use on an incomplete system.
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS