Control: severity -1 serious
On Sat, May 25, 2019 at 02:13:39AM +0100, Wookey wrote:
> > I think this should be fixed asap, ideally in buster. Do you agree with
> > bumping this bug to rcness?
>
> Yes
Bumped.
> > Do you also agree with removing all ac_cv_sizeof_*? (At a later time)
>
> If they are no longer needed by builds, yes. Do packages actually get
> these from the compiler now or does something else populate these
> variables when crossing?
"Recent" autotools gained an AC_COMPUTE_INT to determine the value of a
compile time integral expression. During native compilation it is
essentially printf("%d", ...). For cross compilation autotools
implements it using bisection on char "somearray[integral_expression <
test_value ? 1 : -1];". Repeatedly compiling such programs allows
deducing the value as negatively sized arrays yield a compilation
failure. AC_CHECK_SIZEOF is not implemented using AC_COMPUTE_INT.
Very old configure scripts may still need ac_cv_sizeof_*. The last one I
knew was blt #772590. I don't think we have an old-enough autoconf in
the archive, so any package that fails now is missing source.
For these reasons, I think that continuing to maintain ac_cv_sizeof_* is
not reasonable. And if we do so, we should generate them using
AC_CHECK_SIZEOF at build time. Or just remove them.
Helmut
