Automake versions (was: Patch to make libgcj work with autoreconf again)

[Benjamin Kosnik]

Thanks Tom for pointing this out. We have to all keep these autotools
versions synced: it bugs everybody to have extraneous differences in
trees due to version mis-match.

>Unfortunately, we have automake 1.9.3, 1.9.4 and 1.9.5 floating
>throughout the tree.  

How did this happen?

>I propose standardizing the entire tree on 1.9.6,
>as it is the current release; moreover the 1.9 branch has only had a
>few minor patches since 1.9.6 was released 6 weeks ago so 1.9.6 might
>be stable for a while.

I am in support of this. The sooner the better.

>> Probably we should have a script in contrib/ that downloads and
>> builds all the currently-required tool versions.

>This would be very cool.

That seems like the only solution to end this continual issue. I'm strongly in favor of it.

-benjamin