AC_HEADER_MAJOR vs. glibc 2.25(-to-be)

Paul Eggert eggert@cs.ucla.edu
Fri Sep 2 01:32:00 GMT 2016


>> It seems that the simplest short term solution is to just not use
>> -Werror when building packages.  Other than the warning, the header
>> detection worked, and the test is behaving as documented, right?
> AC_HEADER_MAJOR is obeying the letter of its documentation but not the
> spirit.  People using it reasonably expect that it should handle this
> transition seamlessly for them.

Sure, but Nick's correct that Autoconf-generated code typically cannot be 
configured with -Werror, as there are too many false positives. The problem with 
AC_HEADER_MAJOR is just one of many. So I wouldn't worry about a change causing 
an error for that case. People should not configure with -Werror, that's all.

This has long been common practice among Autoconf users. For example:

> There's your problem right there.  We really do not recommend the use of
> CFLAGS=-Werror during configuration, because it simply does not work.
> ...
> Seriously - the recommendation on this list is that you never use
> -Werror during configure (except maybe to temporarily probe whether
> -Werror even works);

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-autoconf/2012-12/msg00001.html



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