Re: Time for an autoconf update

Over in Fedora-land they're trying to institute support for ARM64,
which among other things means autoconf 2.69 or later:
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-February/178273.html

We are behind the curve.

regards, tom lane

On 02/08/2013 12:21 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Over in Fedora-land they're trying to institute support for ARM64,
> which among other things means autoconf 2.69 or later:
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-February/178273.html
>
> We are behind the curve.
>
>

Is there any good reason not to move to whatever the latest and greatest
is? 2.69 does seem pretty new - even Fedora 17 only comes with 2.68.

cheers

andrew

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> On 02/08/2013 12:21 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> >Over in Fedora-land they're trying to institute support for ARM64,
> >which among other things means autoconf 2.69 or later:
> >http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-February/178273.html
>
> Is there any good reason not to move to whatever the latest and
> greatest is? 2.69 does seem pretty new - even Fedora 17 only comes
> with 2.68.

Considering that only a handful of people need the specific required
autoconf version, I don't think it's a problem to migrate to the latest
and greatest.

--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services

On 2/8/13 12:21 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Over in Fedora-land they're trying to institute support for ARM64,
> which among other things means autoconf 2.69 or later:
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-February/178273.html
>
> We are behind the curve.

What they actually mean is that they need config.guess and config.sub
that is shipped with autoconf 2.69. But the ones in the postgresql
source tree are already of the required version.

The reason I haven't been pushing for autoconf updates in a while is
that the release notes of recent versions consist mostly of "fix
regression in previous release" and no actual features that would be of
use in PostgreSQL's configure script. This should be revisited from
time to time, but it's probably better to do that near the beginning of
a development cycle.

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> On 2/8/13 12:21 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Over in Fedora-land they're trying to institute support for ARM64,
>> which among other things means autoconf 2.69 or later:
>> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-February/178273.html

> What they actually mean is that they need config.guess and config.sub
> that is shipped with autoconf 2.69. But the ones in the postgresql
> source tree are already of the required version.

[ looks... ] Ah, you're right, and it's even true in 9.2 so I won't
be needing a patch for that. Excellent, thanks.

> The reason I haven't been pushing for autoconf updates in a while is
> that the release notes of recent versions consist mostly of "fix
> regression in previous release" and no actual features that would be of
> use in PostgreSQL's configure script. This should be revisited from
> time to time, but it's probably better to do that near the beginning of
> a development cycle.

Agreed, if there are no features or bugfixes that affect us then there's
no particular need to update.

regards, tom lane