Paul Eggert wrote:
On 2023-03-28 08:21, Warren Young wrote:
Surely Solaris 10 (shipped in 2005) is relegated to the role of
porting target, getting nothing but a “dist” tarball?
Good point. I'll cc this to Dagobert Michelsen, who maintains the
Autoconf port for Solaris 10. Dagobert, are people still running
Autoconf on Solaris 10? If not, worrying about porting to older Perl
should be even lower priority than it already is.
For context, this email is about GNU bug 61240:
https://bugs.gnu.org/61240
and the fallout that the latest Autoconf release candidate does not
run on the old version of Perl installed by default on Solaris 10. See:
https://lists.gnu.org/r/autoconf/2023-03/msg00030.html
If OpenCSW already installs a new-enough Perl version then this
Autoconf business shouldn't be a real issue. On the other hand if it's
really trivial to keep Autoconf portable to older Perl, and if Jacob
Bachmeyer or some other Perl expert can vouch for the change, we might
as well put it in.
I have since checked and it appears that the same patch I submitted for
Automake on this bug should also work for Autoconf, applied atop commit
3a9802d60156809c139e9b4620bf04917e143ee2 (also back out the change to
"use 5.008" in that commit, which was bogus for the same reasons I have
previously explained for the Perl version requirement bump in
Automake). Autoconf would also do well to revert commit
61901a1a14fd50c03cfb1529d091554376fef286 and/or possibly split
m4/perl-time-hires.m4 out of that commit and remove the "use 5.010;"
line from it; the correct test is for a perl that has Time::HiRes::stat,
not for any specific version of perl. I find this particularly grating
in Autoconf, where the entire point is supposed to be "test for
features, not versions". :-/
-- Jacob
