Re: [PATCH] compat: reinstate AM_CONFIG_HEADER and AM_PROG_CC_STDC

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 01/18/2013 01:51 PM, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> On 18/01/2013 13:49, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>> So, rather than having one more incompatibility floating around, I'd
>> rather mirror that change (or its relevant part) in mainstream.
> 
> I didn't follow what fedora was doing — yes, please do this otherwise
> it's going to be a massacre for us in Gentoo to get our patches
> upstreamed, as half the people out there don't care whether we can
> rebuild them or not as long as Fedora X does. =_=
> 
I've updated the commit message to reference the Fedora-patched
Automake and our need to avoid diverging from that.  Here is the
updated message.  I will push the patch today or tomorrow if there
is no more feedback.

    compat: reinstate AM_CONFIG_HEADER and AM_PROG_CC_STDC

    Make them give runtime warnings in the obsolete category, but apart
    from that, make them behave as they did in Automake 1.12.x and earlier.

    While removing those macros seemed quite harmless, because it didn't put
    a real burden on the developers (requiring them just to do a quick edit
    to configure.ac), it turned out to place an unsustainable burden (or at
    least, a burden perceived as such) on distro packagers who use the latest
    Automake to bootstrap existing packages.  Many of those packages, while
    having likely updated to AC_CONFIG_HEADERS in their development version,
    still used AM_CONFIG_HEADER in their existing released versions, and the
    removal of this macro would have thus forced the Fedora packagers to
    patch all of them.  References:

      <http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg52840.html>
      <http://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora-devel/msg175922.html>
      <http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2013/01/autotools-mythbuster-automake-pains>

    In addition, the Fedora packagers have already decided to patch their
    Automake 1.13.1 to reinstate the AM_CONFIG_HEADER and AM_PROG_CC_STDC
    macros (plus other macros that I don't believe it's worth worrying about):

      <http://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora-devel/msg176098.html>
      <http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg53030.html>
      <http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/automake.git/commit/?id=ffe6bc39>

    So, rather than having one more incompatibility floating around, we
    better mirror that change (or, actually, its relevant parts) in the
    upstream.

    * m4/obsolete-err.m4 (AM_CONFIG_HEADER, AM_PROG_CC_STDC): Revert to the
    older semantics, plus a runtime warning in the 'obsolete' category.
    * t/backcompat6.sh: Use AM_CONFIG_HEADER once again.
    * t/am-config-header-no-more.sh: Rename ...
    * t/am-config-header.sh: ... like this, and adjust.
    * t/am-prog-cc-stdc-no-more.sh: Rename ...
    * t/am-prog-cc-stdc.sh: ... like this, and adjust.
    * t/list-of-tests.mk: Adjust.
    * NEWS: Update.