Re: Kaffe and newer make tools

Hi James,

thanks for doing the work! I'm holding off from those versions of 
autotools for the reasons listed below. But I'll check in the parts of 
your patch that make sense with the tools we're using at the moment.

James Simmons wrote:
> Since I'm using the latest unstable debian my automake tools are ahead of 
> the tools recommended by kaffe. As usual things broke with the newest 
> tools. So I went a fixed the problems one by one. Here are the steps to 

Basically, Debian has been led into brokenness by a small mistake 
propagating through the autotools by a temporal incompetence worm hole, 
or something like that.

> get kaffe working with 
>
> automake 1.7.9

Weird, or probably broken by default I'd say. The announcement says it 
has been rebuilt with autoconf 2.59 ( 
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/autotools-announce/2003-11/msg00001.html) 
that hasn't been released yet. Suspect, to say the least. I'm keeping my 
hands off that one, until a release comes along that makes more sense in 
its anouncement.

> autoconf 2.58

Unfortunately, it's Debian specific. The release was thoroughly 
mishandled by the autoconf maintainer, and never meant to be officially 
relesead. It's the root of the confusion in the autotools world. Read 
the mildly amusing thread here: 
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2003-11/msg00038.html

I'm waiting for 2.59 or 2.60, whatever ends up being the official 
release, as 2.58 seems to have some ugly bug, as according to the 
thread, the maintainers didn't want to have 2.58 out for to long.

Currently, everybody seems to be eternally confused, so you have people 
downloading and reporting bugs to not officially announced releases like 
here:
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2003-11/msg00102.html

> libtool 1.5.0a

Doesn't exist from the FSF. A debian specific packaging of 1.5+some 
stuff from CVS. If we switched over to that thing we might break all 
other archs. I prefer to wait till FSF releases the next libtool 
releease, be it 1.5.1 or 1.6. Both are under discussion on the libtool 
mailing list. On a side note, I hope someone at the FSF finally got a 
clue from the libtool developers and put the not tainted libtool 1.5 
tarball back online.

> I placed a tar ball on my home page for people to work with. The problem 
> is the patches kaffe applies are now in the standard make system tools. 
> Well except for the superh patch. I got it to work and I tested a few apps 
> with it. It works. 
>
> http://phoenix.infradead.org/~jsimmons/kaffe.tgz

That's an 18 mb file containing a) the whole kaffe tree, b) object 
files, and c) built binaries. A patch would have been more convenient ;)

So I took your archive, untarred it, ungzipped it, cd into it, did a 
make distclean, a cvs -qz9 diff -u > ../james-autotools.patch, and 
that's the attached file. ;) Please submit a ChangeLog entry next time, 
that makes my life easier, as I appreciate any kind of help 
understanding why people make the changes they make ;)

that being said, thanks again!

cheers,
dalibor topic

james-automake.patch.bz2
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