building newlib with recent versions of autotools

[Hans-Bernhard Bröker]

Am 12.02.2018 um 17:42 schrieb Daniel Alley:
> Could you expand on what some of those side effects and breakages were?  

Not really. Because I don't fully remember.

One thing that really got in the way was the rather large number of 
subdirectories that each have their own configury stuff in them.  Those 
all need to be fixed, one by one.  Then libtool and aclocal got into 
squabbles about the contents of those configure.ac and Makefile.am files.

And sooner or later you run into the very peculiar way that newlib wants 
to keep most, but not all of its autoconf'ed configuration flags in a 
separate header file, "newlib.h", while the rest is to be in 
"_newlib_version.h". The input pattern file newlib.h.in is manually 
generated --- but Automake really wants to make its own one, from 
parameter declarations in the configure.ac file.

> Do you know of any other developers within the gcc or autotools communities
> that might be willing to help work through some of those issues?

No.  And given that GCC still sticks with the ancient --cygnus version, 
I suspect they're not actually interested.