Re: Migrating to autoconf 2.52g

[John Poltorak]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 11:57:06AM +0100, Tim Van Holder wrote:
> 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.

Does autoupdate create a new configure.in?

I did manage to build FLEX with autoconf 2.52 by adding the following two 
lines to the original configure.in:-

AC_EXEEXT
AC_OBJEXT



When running autoupdate I get:-

+ autoupdate
autom4te.: no such file or directory: /dev/null
autoupdate.: cannot close autom4te ...


Also I notice a directory called:-

autom4te..cache

in the working directory. Is this name correct? - It looks wrong...#

It contains the files:-

output.0
requests
traces.0

> 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 Basically, when confronted with an outdated configure.in, back up the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.

Can a test to see if these functions need to be run be incorporated into
autoconf itself so that they are run automatically when necessary?
 

-- 
John