Re: autoconf-2.62 doesn't build on RHEL4

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Ralf,

* Ralf Corsepius wrote on Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 03:41:36PM CEST:
> On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 07:19 -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> > You're comparing apples and oranges. 
> I don't see this ... You require a particular version of gm4 instead of
> searching for a feasible, sufficient "m4" (note: m4 vs. gm4).

Autoconf has required GNU m4 for a looong time.  The change now is that
it requires a relatively new (relative in terms of how long you have
been in programming business) version of GNU m4.

You can work around it by building Autoconf using
  ./configure M4=/path/to/m4

with an older m4, but once you choose the path to the dark side, we will
ignore any bug reports from you about broken configure scripts stemming
from this approach.

Really, we require newer m4 because older versions caused autoconf to
create erroneous configure scripts, and those errors were very difficult
to diagnose.  Not to make life harder for you.

Cheers,
Ralf