Re: gdb and ancient GNU autotools

[Joseph Myers via Gdb <gdb@sourceware.org>]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Simon Marchi via Gdb wrote:

> On 2/24/24 13:30, Tomasz Kłoczko via Gdb wrote:
> > Going back to the subject: someone at least started thinking about starting
> > doing something to move away from those ancient GNU autotools versions
> > (probably kicking a few as*ess on integrating properly some
> > libtool changes) or move to meson/cmake?
> 
> Good news, I found a concrete of a problem that would be fixed by moving
> to a newer autoconf:
> 
> https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=31417#c1
> 
> You can start working on patches to bump the autoconf/automake versions,
> I can help with the review.

A reminder: mixing a libtool update into an autoconf/automake update would 
be a bad idea, a libtool update is likely a lot harder, since (a) the 
libtool version used is very old (reportedly based on upstream commit 
2c9c38d8a12eb0a2ce7fe9c3862523026c3d5622); (b) there are many local 
patches, probably including some that are not present upstream; (c) 
libtool commit 3334f7ed5851ef1e96b052f2984c4acdbf39e20c will need 
reverting because of usage of --with-sysroot incompatible with how the 
toolchain uses that option.

I did the last autoconf/automake update in GCC, but that was building very 
heavily on your work on that update for binutils-gdb and would have been a 
lot harder without your work to update the shared files and show the way 
for the sort of changes to make to GCC-specific files.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
josmyers@redhat.com