Re: autoscan: Advising that AC_FUNC_REALLOC is not The Right Thing (TM)

[Miles Bader]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:
>>   The macro was originally added to configure.in on the sug-
>> gestion of autoscan which basically means that in a few
>> years some well-meaning developer will probably re-run auto-
>> scan, re-add the macro and the bug will re-appear.
>
> Autoscan is primarily designed as a once-only program, only done when
> first converting to autotools, and not something you repeatedly run

Exactly.  It also assumes the worst case, advising you check for
things that are pretty much guaranteed to exist on 99.9% of systems
these days (so for a typical project, much of autoscan's advice should
simply be ignored).  Standards conformance is far better these days
than it was in 1995, and most people really don't need to port to
ye-olde-K&R-only-with-bugs systems...

So maybe the best solution is simple: don't run autoscan (again), or
if you do, take its advice with a huge grain of salt.

[If there _is_ some desire to re-run it periodically to catch mistakes
or something, another possible solution would be to keep a simple grep
filter to apply to the autoscan output, which lists all the macros
autoscan suggested in the past which were determined to actually not
be necessary.]

-miles

-- 
Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.