Re: autoconf/automake versions needed for autoreconf

[Jeff Johnston <jjohnstn at redhat dot com>]

Hi Joel,

This is a long-standing problem.  I personally am not happy with the
autotools project.  They don't seem to regard backwards-compatibility
as important.  For example, they removed the cygnus
support but didn't provide any compatibility options or instructions for
conversion.  My belief is that autotools should have dragged along old
support and recognized when a project has an old autotools version number.
We also have kludges in place because
they previously didn't support testing the compiler without building the
executable.  These break with newer autotools.

I have autoconf 2.68 and automake 1.11.6 installed on my system for
generation.  For a while now, I have used a script that regenerates the
configuration files
and don't use autoreconf.  If it is touching files you didn't intend it to,
then you will have to generate the files you want individually like I do.
I think that Corinna has used 2.69 in the past successfully, but I don't
care for all the errors thrown out.  So basically, newlib is locked
down with regards to maximum autotools release.  AFAIK, there isn't
anything in the newer releases that gives us anything or fixes any issues
we haven't
already got around.

If someone has time and wants to detangle the mess, a patch would be
welcome, but I personally don't have the time and I don't
trust autotools not to introduce further backward-compatibility issues that
we may be forever chasing or be forced to freeze the level
of autotools used yet again.

-- Jeff J.

On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 7:26 PM Joel Sherrill <joel@rtems.org> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I know I have asked this multiple times before. :(
>
> I need to bootstrap to turn on libm/fenv. I am doing "autoreconf -fvi" from
> libm. This looks like it might have worked but I get lots of scary output
> using autoconf 2.69:
>
> onfigure.in:11: error: support for Cygnus-style trees has been removed
> Makefile.am:3: error: support for Cygnus-style trees has been removed
> Makefile.am:5: warning: 'INCLUDES' is the old name for 'AM_CPPFLAGS' (or
> '*_CPPFLAGS')
> Makefile.am: installing './INSTALL'
> Makefile.am: error: required file './NEWS' not found
> Makefile.am: error: required file './README' not found
> Makefile.am: error: required file './AUTHORS' not found
> Makefile.am: error: required file './ChangeLog' not found
> Makefile.am: installing './COPYING' using GNU General Public License v3
> file
> Makefile.am:     Consider adding the COPYING file to the version control
> system
> Makefile.am:     for your code, to avoid questions about which license your
> project uses
> automake: warning: autoconf input should be named 'configure.ac', not
> 'configure
>
> It also replaced the top level config.guess and config.sub.
>
> Is that the right command to bootstrap and what versions of autoconf and
> automake should I be using?
>
> Thanks.
>
> --joel
>