Re: How can Autoconf help with the transition to stricter compilation defaults?

Wookey <[email protected]> Sat, 12 Nov 2022 15:59:52 +0000

Newsgroups	dev.linux.lists.c-std-porting
Organization	Wookware
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 2022-11-10 19:08 +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Zack Weinberg via Gcc:
> 
> > It’s come to my attention (via https://lwn.net/Articles/913505/ and
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/PortingToModernC) that GCC and
> > Clang both plan to disable several “legacy” C language features by
> > default in a near-future release (GCC 14, Clang 16) (see the Fedora
> > wiki link for a list).

> based on a limited attempt to get this fixed about three years
> ago, I expect that many of the problematic packages have not had their
> configure scripts regenerated using autoconf for a decade or more.  This
> means that as an autoconf maintainer, you unfortunately won't be able to
> help us much.

We changed the default in debian to re-autoconf on build a few years
ago precisely so that changes in the tools (particularly new arch
support) were picked up even by code that was not being re-released or
released without autofoo updates.  This has worked remarkably well.

So changes in the tools will get used, at least in that context, which
includes a fairly hefty pile of crufty old code. I have no feeling for
how many packages are actually affected by this. Is there a quick way to test?

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/

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