Re: autoconf issues

Am 25.02.2011 11:03, schrieb Michael Militzer:
> thanks for your comments. Our linux build server is running CentOS 5.5,
> so that's not so ancient. On this box, autoconf is however still v2.59.

It's still based on RHEL 5 from 2007. So it's a recent point release, 
but still old software. ;)

> I therefore think that older autoconf versions like 2.59 may still be
> widely in use. So I wonder: Will we not run into other incompatibility
> issues when updating config.guess and config.sub?

I don't think this will cause incompatiblities. These scripts do only 
print out the canonical name of the target platform and generally 
platform codes are only added or improved. It is general practice in 
Debian packages to automatically replace these scripts with the recent 
ones from the autotools-dev package.

> And can you confirm that the patch to configure.in you propose is needed
> only for newer autoconf versions? Because the pthread check in configure
> actually seems to work fine here...

I believe that more recent autoconf versions are stricter when it 
comes to parsing their input code, so yes, autoconf 2.59 may still be 
in use for configure.in files that are not yet adapted and checked for 
syntax errors. There is even a separate autoconf 2.59 package in 
Debian that I could try to run against configure.in, but whatever this 
leads to, the paragraph in configure.in that I pointed you to is 
faulty syntax anyway.

  - Fabian