autoreconf comes with a -Wall flag (much like gcc's) that warns about questionable and/or outdated autoconf/automake practices: https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/autoreconf-Invocation.html Currently when using this flag, it prints many warnings on gcc's various configuration files; there are a lot of them, so I'm not going to paste them here. It would be nice if we could silence these warnings so that we could use that flag cleanly.
I've been working a bit on this in my autotools-tinkering branch in my userspace; it's nowhere near done yet, though... I'm also mirroring the branch on GitHub: https://github.com/cooljeanius/gcc/tree/me/autotools-tinkering I should probably also be opening some bugs against autoconf for some of the screw-ups I've noticed that autoupdate causes when running it on some of gcc's autoconfigury... (e.g. nested AC_TRY_COMPILEs leading to stray _au_m4_changequote([,])s when being upgraded to AC_COMPILE_IF_ELSE, macros in comments getting expanded, stuff inside AC_REQUIRE getting autoupdated even when that breaks the usage of AC_REQUIRE, config/multi.m4 getting broken due to something having to do with argument quoting, spacing/line-length getting ruined, etc.)
(In reply to Eric Gallager from comment #1) > I've been working a bit on this in my autotools-tinkering branch in my > userspace; it's nowhere near done yet, though... I'm also mirroring the > branch on GitHub: > https://github.com/cooljeanius/gcc/tree/me/autotools-tinkering > I should probably also be opening some bugs against autoconf for some of the > screw-ups I've noticed that autoupdate causes when running it on some of > gcc's autoconfigury... (e.g. nested AC_TRY_COMPILEs leading to stray > _au_m4_changequote([,])s when being upgraded to AC_COMPILE_IF_ELSE, macros > in comments getting expanded, stuff inside AC_REQUIRE getting autoupdated > even when that breaks the usage of AC_REQUIRE, config/multi.m4 getting > broken due to something having to do with argument quoting, > spacing/line-length getting ruined, etc.) Some relevant upstream autoconf bugs related to some of the screw-ups I mentioned: https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?110886 (sr #110886: autoupdate produces broken configure.ac) https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=detailitem&item_id=110325 (sr #110325: autoupdate introduces a second invocation of AC_OUTPUT) https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=detailitem&item_id=110324 (sr #110324: autoupdate does some nonsensical changes)