My patches

[Akim Demaille]

Hi Tom,

Good to see you again :)

Right now I don't have enough time to apply my patches, I will
probably do tomorrow Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday, but I will try to
catch up as soon as possible.

I would like to emphasize that there is a chunk of patches which
should be applied altogether if we don't want to leave a broken
Automake in the repo.  As said in the messages corresponding to these
patches (most importantly those related to the revamping of the
handling of variables/macros), the result is quite neat, but the way
to this result was delicate, and I needed several steps to keep
the patches reasonably small.  But some of the steps leave a broken
Automake.

The Automake I have at home fails three tests.  IIRC:

- subcond2
  because it is sensitive to the *indentation* in Makefile, hence it
  is not a semantic failure, purely syntactic.  I'll fix this once
  I know what you preference is (is it Makefile.in or Makefile which
  should fit within 80 cols).

- objc
  because I tend to think there is no reason not to use the OBJC
  linker in the test.  But the converse attitude would be valid too,
  as was explained.  It's a matter of choice.

- ????
  I don't remember which one.   Hm... Yes:

- ?????
  I don't remember the name, but it's compiling both C and C++ code,
  which results in loading twice `[FPFX=CXX]depend2.test', which
  results in *two* definitions of CXXDEPMODE, which my revamping of
  variables now rejects.  The question is whether this double
  definition is really meant (shouldn't one of the CXX be C?).

I left these failures on purpose, but once decisions made, it's easy
to solve.



I have a question: what is the version of Perl we can require.  There
are feature implemented in 5.6 that I would like to use, but is it
acceptable?  More specifically I'm using Class::Struct which was
significantly improved since 5.005, but its only requirement is:

                use 5.005_64;

so we can use it with Perl 5.5, provided that we distribute it
(Hm... is it valid wrt licenses?).  Requiring 5.6 is simpler though.
But if unacceptable, what would you say of using 5.6's Class::Struct?