How can Autoconf help with the transition to stricter compilation defaults?

[Zack Weinberg]

On Thu, Nov 10, 2022, at 10:08 PM, Sam James wrote:
>> On 10 Nov 2022, at 21:10, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
>> While everyone else is discussing big ideas, it would be helpful for me
>> personally if autoconf just made a release with the latest bugfixes.
>
> Before I dive into the rest of this thread: yes, this is one of
> my main thoughts on the matter. Autoconf has a huge network
> effect problem and letting the existing fixes start to propagate
> would be most helpful.

It would be relatively easy for me to take a couple hours this weekend and put out a 2.72 release with everything that's already in trunk and nothing else.  Anyone have reasons I _shouldn't_ do that?

> Note that in autoconf git, we've also got 
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/autoconf.git/commit/?id=f6657256a37da44c987c04bf9cd75575dfca3b60
> which is going to affect time_t efforts too

I have not been following the y2038 work closely.  Is it going to affect things in a good way or a bad way??

zw