Re: Future plans for Autotools

[Richard Purdie]

On Wed, 2021-01-27 at 00:49 +0000, Joseph Myers wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Jan 2021, Richard Purdie wrote:
> 
> > I've also not seen mention of it but the fact that GCC and the
> > toolchain use an ancient version of autoconf has always been rather sad
> > to me.
> 
> I moved GCC from 2.64 to 2.69 in 2018 (building on Simon Marchi's 
> implementation of the same move for binutils + GDB - I expect it would 
> have been much more work without his having already done the changes to 
> the shared files and shown the sorts of changes most commonly needed 
> outside the shared files and directories).

Thanks, I hadn't realised. The only two recipes we never autoreconf are
binutils and gcc, instead we do some painful things to handle libtool
issues so we get our libtool tweaks. It sounds like we should revisit
that. I guess we were so used to not being about to do it we never
looked back at it recently.

Does that mean those projects will autoreconf more regularly if there
are autotools releases?

Cheers,

Richard