Re: [Bug-gnulib] AC_PROG_YACC

[Paul Eggert]

Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> writes:

>   YACC="$GL_BISON -y"

The rest looks OK I guess, but this overrides any YACC settings
imported from the environment or from explicit args, whereas the
Autoconf tradition is to obey such settings.

But I'm still confused as to why any of this is needed.  Maintainers
are expected to have up-to-date tools.  If non-maintainers are
invoking obsolete versions of maintainer tools, then they'll have
other problems anyway.  We need to arrange things so that
non-maintainers don't so often fall into the trap of invoking
maintainer tools.

Is the problem that people are getting sources directly out of CVS and
building them, and that getdate.c is older than getdate.y?  If so,
then perhaps the simplest solution is to update getdate.c's time
stamp.

If fixing CVS time stamps is not enough to fix the problem in
practice, another possibility is to rename getdate.h to get-date.h.
This would be a bit of a backward-compatibility hassle, but it would
be quite a straightforward workaround to this FreeBSD compatibility
glitch.