[sr #110324] autoupdate does some nonsensical changes

[Zack Weinberg]

Follow-up Comment #5, sr #110324 (project autoconf):

Yes, minimized reproduction recipes for erroneous changes would be really
helpful.

I can't promise autoupdate will ever get fixed, both because of a general lack
of developer time, and because I'm not convinced it's _possible_ to fix some
of these bugs short of a ground-up redesign built around an actual parser for
both M4 and shell constructs.  (See the long comment starting at
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/autoconf.git/tree/bin/autoupdate.in#n420 for
a bunch of backstory -- what we have now is the _fifth_ attempt to design an
auto-updater, and it's still got these problems!)  But right now all we have
is anecdotes coupled to long diffs like the ones you and Bruno posted. 
Minimized reproduction recipes would let us think concretely about how the
existing algorithm goes wrong and figure out what, if anything, can be done
about it.


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