autoconf issues

[Philipp Donzé]

Hi all

I’ve been working again a bit on MacAranym compilation for BigSur (hopefully preparing for ARM based Macs) and now I wanted to test some changes I made to the build system on an older Mac OS version.
So I decided to go with a VM running Mac OS X High Sierra (10.13) running an old version of Xcode 8.3.3.
There were many roadblocks I had to circumvent to build-up such an old system with such an old development environment...

So now I have an environment running now the following installed:
autoconf @2.71 devel/autoconf
automake @1.16.3 devel/automake
m4 @1.4.18 devel/m4

But then when running the ./autogen.sh script the „running autoconf“ phase generates the following warnings/problems:

+ Running autoconf: configure.ac:380: warning: The preprocessor macro `STDC_HEADERS' is obsolete.
configure.ac:380: Except in unusual embedded environments, you can safely include all
configure.ac:380: ISO C90 headers unconditionally.
configure.ac:420: warning: your code may safely assume C89 semantics that RETSIGTYPE is void.
configure.ac:420: Remove this warning and the `AC_CACHE_CHECK' when you adjust the code.
configure.ac:433: warning: Update your code to rely only on HAVE_SYS_TIME_H,
configure.ac:433: then remove this warning and the obsolete code below it.
configure.ac:433: All current systems provide time.h; it need not be checked for.
configure.ac:433: Not all systems provide sys/time.h, but those that do, all allow
configure.ac:433: you to include it and time.h simultaneously.
configure.ac:452: warning: The macro `AC_LANG_CPLUSPLUS' is obsolete.
configure.ac:452: You should run autoupdate.
./lib/autoconf/c.m4:262: AC_LANG_CPLUSPLUS is expanded from...
lib/m4sugar/m4sh.m4:692: _AS_IF_ELSE is expanded from...
lib/m4sugar/m4sh.m4:699: AS_IF is expanded from…
…


Those messages are then reported as build errors in Xcode… :-/

Surely somebody knowledgable can give me a hint on how I could fix this.

Best regards
Philipp

[Thorsten Otto]

On Sonntag, 21. März 2021 19:19:19 CET Philipp Donzé wrote:

> Surely somebody knowledgable can give me a hint on how I could fix this.

 

Hm, i'll have to check. STDC_HEADERS might be obsolete in newer automake versions, but the build system uses a much older version. The check for time.h can surely be removed (there isn't any check for HAVE_TIME_H in the sources anyway). Same for RETSIGYTPE. I'm a bit buffled about AC_LANG_CPLUSPLUS: that macro is supposed to switch to use the c++ compiler for the tests instead of the c-ompiler, which will have different results, especially when checking for the math functions. I also wonder why those messages are treated as build errors in Xcode.

 

You could try to run autoupdate, and see what changes are made to the script.

 

[Philipp Donzé]

I’ve seen that the errors were reported while building but the full build still completed successfully. See screenshot below:

The „errors“ are reported while running autoconf only. But the resulting configure script is still usable!?

This is why I sent the pull request for my changes later this evening. Everything build nicely on MacOS 10.13 and Xcode 8… so those „errors“ were just due to the new autoconf tools.

I think I will open a GitHub issue and attach the full list of logs along with the modified version of configure.ac for inspection.

Will let you know when it’s done.

regards

Philipp

[Philipp Donzé]

Added GitHub Issue 81: "autoconf issues“ with details about the errors and the requested files.

Those autoconf/automake macros is definitely not a domain where I would be confident doing changes myself.

(I did in the past add stuff to detect the SDL framework locations on macOS… but since then I’ve never touched that domain again.)

So if somebody could take a look? I would be glad.

Thanks & regards

Philipp

https://github.com/aranym/aranym/issues/81