Hi Eric. On 03/02/2012 04:08 PM, Eric Blake wrote: > On 03/02/2012 07:15 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote: >> Also, note that the workaround removed in c3797b86ccbd9 was severely >> broken to begin with (that is explained in the commit message); >> re-introducing it only to make autoconf buildable out-of-the box on >> an obsolescent Solaris box seems a very bad idea. >> >> On the top of all that: Automake is a maintainer tool, so it's OK for >> it to have requirements tighter w.r.t. older tools that the ones in >> place for its generated Makefiles. After all, Autoconf is already >> requiring a fairly modern GNU m4, so why not require perl 5.6 as well? >> >> In conclusion, I'm quite oriented to close this bug report as a >> "wontfix". > > That's fair for automake. Paul, would it be okay if for autoconf we > borrow the same configure check as automake is using, and globally bump > the requirement to be consistent across the autotools? Technically, you > can use autoconf without automake, so automake requiring newer than > autoconf is possible; but since the tools are generally used together, > being consistent up front can't hurt. > > Stefano, is it worth factoring the automake perl version check into a > separate .m4 file that can then be shared across automake and autoconf, > in the same manner that Getopt.pm is shared? > Not sure if it is worth it -- it's a very dumb check actually:
AC_PATH_PROG([PERL], [perl]) if test -z "$PERL"; then AC_MSG_ERROR([perl not found]) fi # Save details about the selected perl interpreter in config.log. AM_RUN_LOG([$PERL --version]) $PERL -e 'require 5.006;' || { AC_MSG_ERROR( [perl 5.6 or better is required; perl 5.8.2 or better is recommended. If you have several perl versions installed, select the one Automake should use using ./configure PERL=/path/to/perl]) } Maybe, if you think it would be worth it, you could generalize and improve this check a bit, and make it available (from Autoconf 2.70 onwards) as a (undocumented at first?) autoconf macro, say: AC_PATH_PERL([MINIMAL-VERSION=5.0], [LIST-OF-NAMES="perl perl5"], ...) This could be easily re-used by automake without the need of hacky inter-repository syncing... and in the long term probably by third party packages as well, since I suspect that looking for a modern enough perl is not such an uncommon action for configure scripts. WDYT? Thanks, Stefano