On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 12:57 PM, Rene Ladan <r.c.ladan@gmail.com> wrote:
> while writing the FreeBSD port (it's mostly ready), I wondered which
> version of autoconf and automake is suggested for ROS. Currently
> rosdep.yaml just installs all available versions, but when looking at
> the Ubuntu ros-cturtle-ros package it looks like the latest version of
> automake (1.11) suffices (autoconf is not used at all?).

hi Rene,

Because native ROS packages don't use the autotools (they use CMake
instead), we haven't standardized on versions of them.  To determine
the versions that are required, you'd have to look at the packages
that need them.  Use rosdep to find them, e.g.:

rosdep what_needs autoconf
rosdep what_needs automake

It might turn out that some of those packages don't actually need the
autotools.  E.g., the 'stage' package says that it needs autoconf and
automake, but that's stale information, because we long ago updated to
a version of Stage that uses CMake.  Similarly, 'wxswig' says that it
needs automake, but it appears to only run the 'configure' script,
which generally doesn't require the autotools to be installed.  Please
open tickets if you find such unnecessary rosdeps.

	brian.