My experience with autoconf master

[Ross Burton]

Hi,

When I heard that there were plans to release a new autoconf I decided 
to spend a little time rebuilding OpenEmbedded Core with it.  OE is a 
little special in that apart from a few special cases we autoreconf 
*everything* that uses autotools.

So far I've built the bulk of oe-core with a snapshot of autoconf from 
last week with the following failures:

- flex. dnl in AC_CHECK_FUNCS, already fixed in upstream git
- curl. Pointless AC_REQUIRE([AC_RUN_IFELSE]) now causing failure.
- libsdl.  Used $CPP without explicit call of AC_PROG_CPP which now is 
not being called implicitly.
- nasm.  Failure from AC_CHECK_HEADERS formatting (fix is to add a 
newline in the middle of ])]).  Seems like it could be a regression to me.
- ruby.  Not investigated yet.
- apr.  "could not determine the string function for int64_t", not 
investigated yet.
- apt. The AC_PROG_EGREP thing discussed earlier.
- babeltrace. Something about how bison is being detected: very much bad 
code in babeltrace not autoconf.
- ghostscript. "cannot find install-sh". Not investigated yet.

We're carrying several patches but some are very specific to us 
(prefering bash over sh for consistency, or adding new stages to 
autoreconf) and some most likely need further discussion.  I don't see 
any patches that should be upstreamed as-is, at least.

If anyone wants to see what I'm up to, my branch is at 
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/log/?h=ross/newautoconf.

Ross