Re: Migrating to autoconf 2.52g

[Tim Van Holder]

On Mon, 2002-02-04 at 11:27, John Poltorak wrote:
> 
> When running configure from autoconf 2.52g, the search for an install 
> program correctly locates c:/usr/bin/install.exe - (this is on OS/2), but 
> when trying to build an old app such as flex 2.5.4a it only finds 
> ./install.sh. 

Yes, old autoconves were not very friendly to DOSish systems;
AC_PROG_INSTALL is a typical example.

> Do I need to run some conversion program first to update an old 
> configure.in file?

autoconf 2.5x provides 'autoupdate', which will try to do just that.
Be warned though that many applications used configure.ins that relied
on undocumented and unsupported autoconf internals; those will often
break with autoconf 2.5x, and may require non-trivial rewriting.

Basically, when confronted with an outdated configure.in, back up the
configure script and run a recent autoconf/autoheader (possibly in
tandem with a recent aclocal & automake).
If autoconf does not complain, things will probably be ok.
If it complains, try running autoupdate, and then autoconf again.

If that still doesn't work, you have two options.  If you have a fair
knowledge of autoconf/m4, you can look through the configure.in and try
to figure out what the problem is (optionally rewriting some portions).
Otherwise, your only option will probably be to restore the original
configure script and patch its problematic portions by hand.  Either
way, some amount of work will be involved.