On 2022-11-16 10:59, Zack Weinberg wrote:
I'm generally in agreement with Rich Felker's argument (inhttps://ewontfix.com/13/) that AC_CHECK_FUNC*should not* just probe for linkability of a symbol
So am I. I'm not saying Autoconf should never change here, only that the change would not be trivial. It would require changing many configure.ac scripts scattered over many software projects, because Autoconf cannot be expected to know every signature of every function in every library.
Any such transition could not be done in a week, or a month, or even a year. I would guess it would take a decade at least. In the meantime if Clang becomes pickier by default it would be helpful if there were a well-defined way to shut off Clang's pickiness. If the Clang developers provide such a way we can use it; if not, Autoconf will just have to do what it always does, and figure a way out anyway (hey! it could drop into assembler...).
Things would be simpler if Clang became pickier by default only for declarations that are not "char foo();" or "char foo(void);". Then, existing 'configure' scripts would still work.
