Re: Building fails on Debian woody because of stupid autoconf wrapper

[Kai Großjohann]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> Anyway, I came to a conclusion that I don't understand why did that cause 
> trouble for Kai, since he obviously didn't try to regenerate the 
> configury stuff.  Kai, can you explain?

When I build Emacs, I run a script which tries to start from a clean
slate.  This means that the script begins with "make distclean" and
then runs "autoconf".

On Debian woody, both Autoconf 2.13 and Autoconf 2.50 are installed,
and /usr/bin/autoconf is a script which tries to automagically select
the right version.  However, the magic leaves quite a bit to be
desired, since all the script does is to search various files
(aclocal.m4 amongst them) for the AC_PREREQ(...) pattern, and then
compares the "..." part with 2.13.  If the "..." part is greater than
2.13, then the real Autoconf 2.50 is invoked, else the real 2.13 is
invoked.

The problem happens because the less-than-perfect magic finds
AC_PREREQ even if it is in a comment :-(

Obviously, there are two ways to approach this problem:

(1) Change Emacs such that the faulty magic from Debian does the right
    thing.

(2) Repair the faulty magic in Debian.

I have already submitted a Debian bug report about (2).  (The report
was without a fix, I can send them a fix, too, if you think that would
be a good idea.  But the trick is extremely trivial and just a wart on
top of the existing warts: I remove everything from dnl to end of line
before searching for AC_PREREQ.)

I was asking whether it's worth to do (1).

Does this make the situation clearer?
kai

PS: Should I stop running autoconf after every "cvs update"?
-- 
GNU/Linux provides a nice `poweroff' command, but where is `poweron'?