Re: [tcpdump-workers] Autoconf with Debian patches

[Denis Ovsienko via tcpdump-workers]

--- Begin Message ---
On Sat, 7 Jan 2023 18:47:37 -0800
Guy Harris  wrote:

> On Jan 7, 2023, at 8:51 AM, Denis Ovsienko 
> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 6 Jan 2023 17:13:20 -0800
> > Guy Harris  wrote:
> >   
> >> On Jan 6, 2023, at 3:31 PM, Denis Ovsienko 
> >> wrote:
> >>   
> >>> It is the latter, and a custom Autoconf seems an unreasonable
> >>> requirement for contributing.
> >> 
> >> Reasonable, or unreasonable?  
> > 
> > Unreasonable, if it is more complicated than installing an Autoconf
> > package using the package manager of the OS.  
> 
> Which it is likely to be.

Okay, let's not go out of the packaged Autoconf space then.

> >> (By the way, have other Linux distributions applied the same
> >> changes that Debian and its derivatives have?  If not, then users
> >> of those distributions would be in the same situation as macOS and
> >> FreeBSD users.)  
> > 
> > I do not remember to what extent these patches have propagated
> > beyond Debian and Ubuntu.  Maybe somebody else has other
> > distributions ready to check?  
> 
> Fedora 36 and later appear to ship autoconf 2.71; the Debian sid
> package for autoconf 2.71 applies no patches to it, as, I presume,
> all of the Debian packages are applied (the off_t patch is already
> incorporated in 2.71).  Debian's currently shipping 2.69, which
> requires their pile of patches.

Thank you for this information.  Let me add that Ubuntu 20.04 defaults
to 2.69, but Ubuntu 22.04, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and OmniOS all
currently default to Autoconf 2.71.  Would it make the most sense to
make 2.71 the nominal version (especially for releases), but to maintain
backward compatibility with 2.69 for quite a while longer?

> Fedora shipped autoconf 2.69, without a patch like the Debian off_t
> patch but with a patch like the Debian "add runstatedir" patch.  I
> don't know what RHEL has.
> 
> Looking at the Arch Linux repository, there doesn't appear to be a
> version of the off_t patch from when they shipped 2.69; they're
> currently shipping 2.71.  The same applies to Gentoo.
> 
> But at least some of them have 2.71 patches, so there's no guarantee
> that all the releases that have 2.71 will generate exactly the same
> script.

Identical behaviour everywhere would be unrealistic.  Minimizing the
average noise level in pull requests should be realistic, although not
critical, but nice to have.

-- 
Denis Ovsienko
--- End Message ---
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Re: [tcpdump-workers] Autoconf with Debian patches

[Guy Harris via tcpdump-workers]

--- Begin Message ---
On Jan 8, 2023, at 5:24 AM, Denis Ovsienko  wrote:

> Thank you for this information.  Let me add that Ubuntu 20.04 defaults
> to 2.69, but Ubuntu 22.04, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and OmniOS all
> currently default to Autoconf 2.71.

...and macOS doesn't ship with autoconf in the first place, so the user would 
have to install a third-party version.

The current GNU release is 2.71, and the current Homebrew release:

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/autoconf#default

is 2.71, so...

> Would it make the most sense to make 2.71 the nominal version (especially for 
> releases), but to maintain
> backward compatibility with 2.69 for quite a while longer?

...yes.

That means people should be careful when updating the configure script, and 
might call for at least one part of the CI process involve testing, on a 
machine with 2.69 installed, both "does it work if you just use the packaged 
configure script?" and "does it work if you get rid of configure and 
config.h.in, run autoconf to generate the script with 2.69, and use the 
resulting configure script?", to catch cases where people aren't careful.--- End Message ---
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