Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> writes: > At this point, it would be a good idea to mark all AC_FUNC_* macros that > request an AC_LIBOBJ replacement as obsolete and refer the user to Gnulib > for both the macro and the workaround code (and the documentation). > Except maybe AC_FUNC_MALLOC and AC_FUNC_REALLOC, because the replacement > code for them is so trivial that anyone can make it up himself. > The affected macros are: > - AC_FUNC_ERROR_AT_LINE > - AC_FUNC_GETLOADAVG > - AC_FUNC_LSTAT_FOLLOWS_SLASHED_SYMLINK > - AC_FUNC_MEMCMP > - AC_FUNC_MKTIME > - AC_FUNC_OBSTACK > - AC_FUNC_STAT, AC_FUNC_LSTAT > - AC_FUNC_STRTOD > - AC_FUNC_STRNLEN > - AC_REPLACE_FNMATCH
This seems like a reasonable plan to me, but if you do this, the one additional request I have is to please retain somewhere in the Autoconf documentation a mention that these functions have known portability issues. I think many people use the Autoconf manual as one input source (of several) of information about functions that may need portability work on platforms one doesn't have at hand when doing development, and I'd like to not lose that information. The one drawback of this is that this change will be frustrating for users of the Autoconf macros who were providing their own replacement implementations, since now they either have to write their own Autoconf macros as well or have to deal with importing of Autoconf macros from Gnulib, which is more complex than using macros that are part of Autoconf (particularly in keeping them up-to-date). I know that Gnulib has tools for that for projects that use Gnulib completely, which is the primarly Gnulib target audience, but that's some overhead for projects that were never using Gnulib and now would be asked to use it just for one or two Autoconf macros. It may be that at this point selectively pulling things from Gnulib is so easy that this is just a matter of documentation, but it's something to be aware of. -- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
