Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes: > Alvaro Herrera <alvhe...@alvh.no-ip.org> writes: >> Ah, yeah. That was 2.71 actually: >> https://postgr.es/m/3838336.1657985...@sss.pgh.pa.us >> 1.72 seems to have been released with some fixes from that one. Per >> that thread, the related problem you noticed was with m4, and apparently >> it was because macOS ships a version from 2006 (1.4.7). Here on Debian >> bookworm I have m4 1.4.19; maybe macOS has updated its copy now? > > macOS hasn't gotten better: > > $ which m4 > /usr/bin/m4 > $ m4 --version > GNU M4 1.4.6 > Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. > This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO > warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. > > It does seem like you-need-a-newer-m4 will be an issue for some folks, > but given that you only need it to rebuild the configure script, maybe > that will be a small enough set of people that we can cope. (In > particular, the buildfarm wouldn't need updates.) On macOS, it's > already pretty difficult to do useful development without any packages > from MacPorts or Homebrew. MacPorts is shipping m4 1.4.19, and I'm > sure Homebrew has something modern as well, so it's not like people > would be forced to do their own builds on that platform. > > So maybe we should revive that idea, though I'd definitely target > autoconf 2.72 not 2.71.
Just a data point: autoconf 2.72 came out under a year ago, so the most recent Debian Stable (12) and Ubuntu LTS (24.04) only have 2.71. If they stick to the the roughly-2-yearly cadence, Debian 13 will be out before PostgreSQL 18, but the next Ubuntu LTS release isn't until April 2026. They both have m4 1.4.19, though. > regards, tom lane - ilmari
