autoconf 2.59 [was: 2.60] runs into an endless loop

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "sjt" == Stephen J Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

>>>>> "Mike" == Mike FABIAN <mfabian at suse.de> writes:

    Mike> Andreas Schwab <schwab at suse.de> made a patch to make it work
    Mike> with autoconf 2.60. It is attached.

    sjt> Great!  Thanks!  And pass on our thanks to Andreas.

Unfortunately, Andreas's patch breaks 2.59 in the same way.  Given the
way that loop termination test is written (not to mention autotools
history), it's unsurprising.  I don't think you can win in both versions.

I spent a few minutes trying to find a way to conditionalize, but it's
quite unclear how to do so portably (seems at least in the documents
available to me m4_version_compare is undocumented, which means that
semantics may change at any time), so I'm punting.

My feeling is that we should avoid using a language that can't even
implement a fundamental primitive with the same semantics from one
minor version to the next, and go back to programming this kind of
thing in shell.  Malcolm?


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