Mail Archives: djgpp/2001/07/25/07:01:50
Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:
>
> Peter J. Farley III <pjfarley3 AT escape DOT com> wrote:
> > In the past, running DJGPP autoconf against previously unix-only
> > configure scripts was advised to permit various unixy tests
> > (especially the notorious test for executables with no "EXE_EXT"
> > macros used) to work cleanly.
>
> Actually, that was quite a while back, AFAIK. At the moment, the
> recommended solution seems to be to just run the configure script
> as-is, after making sure that the DJGPP version of config.site is in
> scope. Most of the necessary tricks (TEST_FINDS_EXE, PATH_SEPARATOR=:
> and so on) have been put into config.site, for that purpose.
Yes, bash has several workarounds for such issues, but I've tried
very hard to get these things supported by autoconf directly so they
will no longer be needed for configure scripts. Aside from proper
executable extension support (which may make it into autoconf 2.53
mainline, and is already present in the 2.50 DJGPP release), that is
now the case.
Note that the autoconf 2.50 config.site file is geared strictly
towards DJGPP's autoconf 2.50; in order for it to help out
Unix-generated or older configures, you'll need to add
if test -z "$as_ln_s" ||
test ! "$ac_default_prefix" = "/dev/env/DJDIR"; then
# This is either an old or Unix-generated configure script
# so we need to enable the bash executable-finding workarounds
export TEST_FINDS_EXE=y
fi
# And 2.13 configures probably want this too
test -z "$as_ln_s" && export PATH_SEPARATOR=:
at the top. The conditionals are there because I don't recommend
setting either TEST_FINDS_EXE or PATH_SEPARATOR for a configure
script generated with the DJGPP package of 2.50 or higher; the
former neuters the executable extension mechanism, and the latter
is superfluous (configures detects the pathsep at startup).
> > With the advent of autoconf 2.50 and the more recent port of bash
> > 2.04, is it still advisable to re-run autoconf on unix-developed
> > source packages to re-create the configure script?
>
> No, it isn't. autoconf-2.50 is a beta release,
autoconf 2.50 is NOT a beta release.
> and it's incompatible
> with existing packages and their configure.in's. Even on actual Unix
It is (for the most part) NOT incompatible with older autoconf's.
However, due to the long inactivity of autoconf development, many
configure.ins currently in use relied on undocumented, unsupported
internals of autoconf 2.13 to provide their own extended functionality.
Many internals were rewritten for 2.50, so many configure.ins (that were
broken, but accepted by 2.13) are no longer accepted by 2.50 and above.
For configure.in files that do not rely on 2.13 internals, the
autoupdate
script that comes with 2.50 and above should smoothly update the file,
so very little manual work (if any) is needed to upgrade to 2.50.
> systems, most packages stop working if you run autoconf-2.50. If you
It is true many Unix-based packages are experiencing problems upgrading
(including, but not limited to, Gnome 2.0). But
a) these are mostly due to the reasons listed above, and
b) autoconf 2.13 is dead - it's obsolete and unsupported, so it
is not recommended to keep on using it for production software
> want to run autoconf on existing packages, use the DJGPP port of
> autoconf-2.13. Only if the package explicitly requires 2.50 (you'll
> notice: it should have AC_PREREQ(2.50)), you'll want to use that.
Well, I'd suggest first trying autoupdate + autoconf 2.50; on the
whole, autoconf 2.50 is much better at support DOS and OS/2 without
requiring the shell to have special workarounds enabled.
For problem files, it would probably be easier to run the DJGPP version
of 2.13 (though I would prefer it if DJGPP maintainers upgraded to
2.50).
If it would be useful, I could update the autoconf 2.50 package (or 2.52
if I release it) to also contain 2.13 in parallel, so you could easily
have both installed (for cases when you're unable or unwilling to
upgrade).
--
Tim Van Holder - Anubex N.V.
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