Re: new snapshot available: autoconf-2.72c

[Zack Weinberg]

Please don't top-post on this mailing list.

On Tue, Mar 28, 2023, at 12:12 PM, Frederic Berat wrote:
> Regarding EGREP, although I agree in principle this can be solved by
> using AS_CASE, I'd argue that the component actually required
> AC_PROG_EGREP. In principle, that should be enough, and requesting the
> user to know that internally there may be some need for
> "_AC_PROG_EGREP_TRADITIONAL" that it can't require for, which implies
> that using AS_CASE is mandatory, seems excessive.

In general, *any* construct of the form

case "$var" in
  foo) AC_CHECK_THING ;;
esac

at top level of configure.ac (not within the expansion of any other
macro) is incorrect and needs to be rewritten using AS_CASE.  Same for
if statements.  See
https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.71/html_node/Prerequisite-Macros.html
for why.

In this specific case, I suspect there _is_ a bug in Autoconf, but more
along the lines of "nobody should still be using $EGREP_TRADITIONAL in 2023"
than "some macro isn't AC_REQUIREing all of its dependencies."

zw