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

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>
Cc: pgsql-hackers(at)postgreSQL(dot)org, marti(at)juffo(dot)org
Subject: Re: Why buildfarm member anchovy is failing on 8.2 and 8.3 branches
Date: 2011-08-29 23:41:04
Message-ID: 5694.1314661264@sss.pgh.pa.us
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Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)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

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