[sr #110886] autoupdate produces broken configure.ac

Zack Weinberg <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.sysutils.autoconf.bugs
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Follow-up Comment #5, sr #110886 (project autoconf):

Yeah, these are all aspects of another really basic limitation: the _only_
thing autoupdate can fix is obsolete macros.  It can't fix quotation errors,
it can't fix badly placed `dnl`, and it can't fix misuse of `AC_REQUIRE`.  And
all these things may cause it to produce ill-formed output.

If you're seriously thinking of working on this, I think you should look at
writing your own dedicated parser for machine-assisted refactoring of Autoconf
scripts.  It's not going to be easy.  I'd probably start with the
[https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ tree-sitter] grammar for Bash
(there currently isn't a tree-sitter grammar for either M4 or POSIX shell
without Bash extensions).


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