autoconf vs. stdin [was: Broken makefile given Autoconf version mismatch]

[Eric Blake]

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According to Stepan Kasal on 4/14/2006 2:35 AM:
> 
> The problem is that autom4te calls m4 with `</dev/null' because of a
> problem with a development version of m4:
> There is a related problem:
> 
>   autom4te -l Autoconf-without-aclocal-m4 -
> 
> still wouldn't work, because find_file doesn't recognize `-' as stdin.

Why do we even try to support autoconf reading from stdin?  I remember at
one point cygwin had a wrapper script that tried to choose between
autoconf 2.13 and 2.5x, and it was overly complicated because it was
trying to cater to the fact that autoconf might be reading from a
non-seekable stdin.  Things got a lot simpler when the wrapper script was
changed to assume that the input file to autoconf is passed by name and is
seekable.  And since it appears that autoconf has not parsed stdin for
several years, with no complaints, maybe it is smarter to not document
that as a valid usage pattern.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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