Re: [PATCH] Fix a few deprecation warnings with the autotools config

[Philippe Michel]

On Sun, May 12, 2024 at 01:38:30PM -0400, Nikolas Nyby wrote:

> * Removed AC_PROG_CC_STDC. This was apparently needed by gcc 4.4, but
>   that is so old by now, I think we can remove it.
> * Removed AC_PROG_LIBTOOL in favor of the current LT_INIT
> * Updated the iconv.m4 macro with the upstream version from gnu, which
>   fixes a few warnings, as the old version was calling the deprecated
>   AC_TRY_LINK.

I'm not sure updating iconv.m4 alone is sound. It is part of gettext, 
currenly at version 0.17 in gnubg. It seems preferable to update the 
gettext version used (20 files or so in m4 and po) to 0.19. That will 
get rid of the AC_TRY_LINK issue.

At this time, gnubg can be built on distributions as old as CentOS 6, 
that uses gettext 0.17. We could relax it to "as far back as CentOS 7", 
that uses gettext 0.19.

This will still be conservative but will raise the minimum required 
version of other tools (gcc, autoconf) or libraries, taking care of the 
first two issues and allowing to get rid of a small amount of 
conditional code related to Glib, GTK2, etc... versions.