building newlib with recent versions of autotools

[Daniel Alley <daniel dot alley6 at gmail dot com>]

​​Hello,

I have recently started working on a project which uses newlib, and was a
little surprised to find that it required very old versions of automake to
build due to the use of the --cygnus flag which was removed in automake
versions >2.64

I looked through the mailing list archives and noticed that there was a
series of emails  about this in 2016 which made (what seems like, to an
uninformed observer), a fairly significant amount of progress towards
fixing the issue.  But the discussion seems to have abruptly ended without
much in the way of resolution, and it doesn't appear as though any actions
were taken.

I was hoping that one of the newlib devs could give an update on this -
whether the patches which were developed in the email thread will be
applied upstream at some point, or there were problems with the approach
discovered off-list... etc.  Should we expect to be locked to these older
tools for the foreseeable future?

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes a look at this,
Daniel


(My apologies for linking these all individually, but some of them were out
of chronological order when viewing the archive by topic, and I wanted to
avoid confusion.)

https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg00984.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg00986.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg00987.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg00988.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg00989.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg00990.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg01002.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg01006.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg01014.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg01015.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg01016.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg01017.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg01044.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg01045.html