Re: autoconf trouble in the CVS HEAD

Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> writes:
> On Wed, 19 Dec 2007, KaiGai Kohei wrote:
>> It seems to me this check enforces us to use autoconf 2.59, not the latest one.
>> Is there any reason for this change?

> The brutally long thread at 
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-11/msg00706.php gives 
> more background on this topic.

The short answer to this is that if you want to re-run autoconf from
configure.in, and you want to use some other autoconf version than the
one the Postgres project officially supports for the particular PG
branch, you're free to patch that line out of configure.in and do what
you want.  The check is in there to keep *us* from doing something we
don't want to do, which is to ship a version of the configure script
that we have not tested.  When you override the project's choice of
autoconf version, it's entirely on your own head whether the result
works or not.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do this --- I'll very likely have to do it
myself in at least some Red Hat/Fedora branches.  It's just that the
project isn't going to support these combinations.
        regards, tom lane