On Wed, Feb 18, 2026, at 12:08 PM, Emily Ammundsen wrote:
> Thank you for your help, and your offer to help with particular code.  I 
> think I will put this project on the backburner until I am hit with a 
> desire to learn the depths of gnu build tools and M4 as the project has 
> issues many warnings (including one about improperly quoted arguments), 
> and gnu build tools is something I would like to learn at some point.

Fair enough.

> http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/lincity/lincity_1.13.1.orig.tar.gz

I haven't checked, but there's a good chance that
https://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/lincity/lincity_1.13.1-17.debian.tar.xz
contains, among other things, a patch that will make this old program buildable
using current Autoconf.

> As for building autoconf, it turns out that `./bootstrap -v` only fails if 
> I do a shallow clone of the repository. I clearly don't know enough git, 
> as I assumed shallow clones would always be safe.

Ah.  Yes, that makes sense.  When building from a git checkout, the build
scripts (not just the bootstrap script) inspect the git *history* to determine
Autoconf's own version number, and that doesn't work with a shallow clone.
I will add a note to README-hacking about this; thank you for bringing it to
my attention.

zw

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