Re: [platform-testers] new snapshot available: autoconf-2.72c

[Richard Purdie]

On Wed, 2023-03-29 at 01:53 +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Richard Purdie wrote:
> > > We run autoreconf against most things.
> > > ...
> > > gettext 0.21.1:
> > > ...
> > 
> > The latter two look like they're as I'm missing the gnulib fixes to
> > largefile.m4.
> 
> autoreconf is not supported in GNU gettext; there's a script 'autogen.sh'
> instead.

I appreciate the official way to do it is using those scripts.

We (as in Yocto Project) are able to autoreconf most software and have
been doing this for a long time now. We have our own code to do it
generically since autogen scripts tend to do other things we don't want
such as network access which would break other project goals such as
reproducibility and license auditing. The autogen scripts tend not to
be as standardised either. About the only things we don't do this with
are gcc/binutils/gdb for historical reasons around their version
requirements for autoconf.

> When I run this script on the branch where gettext 0.21.1 has been made,
> I get this error:
> 
>   ./autogen.sh: generating configure in gettext-runtime...
>   configure:8378: error: possibly undefined macro: 
> _AC_SYS_LARGEFILE_TEST_INCLUDES
>         If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
>         See the Autoconf documentation.
> 
> So, you are right that largefile.m4 from Gnulib is too old. I have now
> updated the 'largefile' and 'year2038' modules on the stable-* branches
> of Gnulib. This ensures compatibility with autoconf-2.72c.
> 
> Note: To get the fix, it's not enough to run 'autoreconf'. The upstream
> maintainer needs to pull from gnulib, then run 'bootstrap' or
> autopull.sh+autogen.sh.

Thanks, that will certainly help encourage software to have the updated
macros

Cheers,

Richard