[article] trimming down autoconf's configure scripts by using pkg-config

[Gabor Gombas]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 08:30:23PM +0800, Rogelio Serrano wrote:

> I always encounter that. If i say i686-pc-linuc-uclibc configure dies.
> And i found it impossible to update autoconf and libtool to recognise
> this.

You don't have to update autoconf and libtool has nothing to do with it.
Just grab a new enough config.guess and config.sub. Of course, if the
configure.(in|ac) script makes decisions based on the host type, then
you may have to also update configure.(in|ac).

> But that can break. It happens often when i try to build old packages.
> Like the sdsi tarball from MIT. The configure script was so old I had
> to update it but autotools gave back errors that just seem to keep
> coming back even if i fixed it. I had to install older autotool
> versions to build it. I think autoconf 2.13 and autoconf 2.50 will
> cover packages of whatever vintage.

There are significant differences between autoconf 2.13 and 2.50+.
configure.in scripts written for 2.13 usually need (sometimes
non-trivial) manual tweaking before they work with 2.50.

Gabor

-- 
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     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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