Re: Why buildfarm member anchovy is failing on 8.2 and 8.3 branches

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> On 08/28/2011 04:15 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> The bottom line seems to be that autoconf 2.59 is seriously broken on
>> recent toolchains.  Should we try to do something about that, like
>> migrate the 8.2 and 8.3 releases to a newer autoconf?  8.2 is close
>> enough to EOL that I don't mind answering "no" for it, but maybe we
>> should do that in 8.3.

> If we're going to do it for 8.3 we might as well for 8.2 at the same 
> time, ISTM, even if it is close to EOL.

I looked into this and decided that actually starting to use autoconf
2.61 or later isn't very feasible.  The trouble is that in 2.61, there
is a new set of install-directory options, eg htmldir exists where it
did not before.  When Peter updated us to 2.61 in PG 8.4, he made some
significant user-visible changes in configure's set of installation
directory options, and even in the default locations of some installed
documentation files.  I think changing that sort of thing in 8.3.16
(to say nothing of 8.2.22) is out of the question; for example, it's
likely to break packaging scripts.  I thought for a little bit about
whether we could hack on 2.61 until it presented the same
installation-directory behavior as 2.59, but that would take a lot more
work and testing than I have any desire to put in.

What *does* seem feasible is to back-port just the single change we
actually need, by copying the two relevant macros into one of our
config/ source files for the configure script.  I've tested that in
8.3 and it seems to work --- at least, the generated configure script
changes in the expected way.  This also seems like a reasonably sane
thing to back-port to 8.2.  So I'll go ahead and commit those things
and see if anchovy likes it.
        regards, tom lane