Re: autoconf-2.68b released [beta]

[Eric Blake]

[dropping all lists except autoconf]

On 03/02/2012 09:09 AM, Olaf Lenz wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> On 03/02/2012 05:45 AM, Eric Blake wrote:
>> The Autoconf team is considering releasing only .xz files for 2.69; 
>> if this would be a hardship for you, and you need the .gz or .bz2 
>> release, please speak up now.
> 
> I want to second Bob Friesenhahn's opinion that it would be nice to keep
> at least a .gz release version. The xz-utils are not part of all
> standard distributions yet (I can just name the current Sabayon Linux
> and openSUSE 11.3), so I would prefer it if a standard tool like autoconf
> would not depend on it.

Fair enough.  Even though coreutils has switched to .xz-only, I will
keep autoconf 2.69 at both .gz and .xz (but drop .bz2).

> 
> Another issue I have with 2.68b is the dependency on m4 versions 1.4.6 -
> 1.4.10 or 1.4.16. One of the bad versions is installed on most machines
> that I use, therefore I would have to install a more recent version on
> all of them, sometimes even manually. Is this really a hard requirement,
> or is it possible to circumvent this somehow? What would happen if the
> "bad" versions would be used?

Autoconf is doing a feature test, not version test, of m4.  The actual
feature being tested is whether m4's replacement to strstr() has a bug
that results in false positives.  M4 1.4.11 - 1.4.15, on some platforms
(but not all), had this bug, and there are actual configure.ac scripts
in the wild where the mis-behaving m4 string search function resulted in
broken configure scripts - which is why we added that feature test to
autoconf's configure in the first place.  So yes, it really is a hard
requirement that you have a working m4.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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