[csw-maintainers] Autoconf 2.13

[Ben Walton]

Excerpts from Joerg.Schilling's message of Fri Mar 09 10:22:49 -0500 2012:

Hi Jörg,

> A configure run on SunOS-4.x and other older systems for a medium
> sized configurations typpically takes 4 hours.

Is this not simply a product of old, small hardware?

> The code for config.guess has been completely reordered so that it
> is not possible to tell whether thare are bad changes inside (note
> that I added and forwared many patches to support various additional
> platforms).

Interesting.  That does seem to be a downside.

> In general, the created shell codes is no longer portable and seems
> to at least partially depend on bash bugs.

I don't understand this.  It runs in POSIX sh on any of the Solaris
platforms I've tried (admittedly I'm not doing SunOS archaelogy).  The
core autoconf stuff is supposed to be fully portable.  It's certainly
possible for a project to directly include non-portable shell code
(and I do see this from time to time), but the stuff generated from
autoconf-delivered m4 has always been clean in my experience...

> BTW: schily autoconf fully supports cross compilation (since
> aprox. a year) and GNU autoconf still doesn't.

Cool!

Thanks
-Ben
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302