Re: AC_HEADER_MAJOR vs. glibc 2.25(-to-be)

[Zack Weinberg]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 9:32 PM, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> It seems that the simplest short term solution is to just not use
>>> -Werror when building packages.  Other than the warning, the header
>>> detection worked, and the test is behaving as documented, right?
>>
>> AC_HEADER_MAJOR is obeying the letter of its documentation but not the
>> spirit.  People using it reasonably expect that it should handle this
>> transition seamlessly for them.
>
> Sure, but Nick's correct that Autoconf-generated code typically cannot be
> configured with -Werror, as there are too many false positives. The problem
> with AC_HEADER_MAJOR is just one of many. So I wouldn't worry about a change
> causing an error for that case. People should not configure with -Werror,
> that's all.

The original problem was that AC_HEADER_MAJOR doesn't detect that
glibc 2.25 is throwing warnings, so a *build* with -Werror fails.  I
agree that telling people to *configure* with -Werror is a
non-solution.

zw