Re: Guide on updating autofoo

[Gavin Smith]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Wookey <address@hidden> wrote:
> As porting work (for arm64) recently I have done a lot of fixing up
> packages to run autoreconf on build as this is the only way to ensure
> that their config.sub/guess and libtool files are up to date for
> architectures released since the software last had it's auto* files
> updated.
>
> In general this works well, but we sometimes get breakage if the
> autoconf macros in the package are particularly old and unloved. i.e
> are still using a lot of now-deprecated stuff.
>
> I have not found a good guide on best practice in updating such
> files. Is there one? The lack of such is one reason people don't
> update their configure.in/ac until they are forced to, I suspect.
>

The NEWS file in the automake distribution has some information about
the changes between versions.