m4_warn([category], [message]) passes its arguments directly to
Autom4te::Channels::msg. If the category argument is not a recognized
“channel”, that function will crash and emit a *Perl* stack trace,
which makes it look like there’s something wrong with autoconf or
autom4te, rather than something wrong with the script.
Making matters worse, in autoconf 2.69, the manual said you could
use “all” and the empty string as the first argument to m4_warn.
As far as I can tell, neither of those was ever a valid message
channel, and the manual was corrected in 2.70, but we still got
a bug report from someone who tried it.
This patch makes us issue a nice helpful user error, instead of a
confusing internal error, when Autom4te::Channels::msg is called with
a bogus channel argument. If the bogus channel is “all” or the empty
string, that error is demoted to a -Wobsolete warning. If it is one
of the other special tokens recognized by -W, we customize the error
message, since someone might’ve thought that “none” being acceptable
to -W meant it was also acceptable to m4_warn. The --help output for
autoconf, autoheader, autom4te, and autoreconf is also adjusted to
clarify that not all of the tokens recognized by -W count as
warning categories.
(Oddly enough, the lack of filtration at the autom4te level means
m4_warn([error], […]) actually does issue an error. There’s no other
way to get exactly that effect — m4_errprintn(…) and m4_fatal(…)
both do something a little different — so I I propose to leave that
alone for now and promote it to a proper, documented feature, probably
spelled m4_error(…), post-2.72.)
Channels.pm and ChannelDefs.pm are shared with Automake. I believe
there is nothing you can write in a Makefile.am that will cause
Automake::Channels::msg to be called with an arbitrary user-supplied
channel argument, so these changes should have no visible effect on
that side of the fence.
Addresses <https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?110872>.
* lib/Autom4te/Channels.pm (msg): If the channel argument is invalid,
don’t crash; report the mistake and use the ‘syntax’ channel.
(report_bad_channel): New function for reporting invalid channels.
* lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm (usage): Clarify that the list of
warning categories is exhaustive, and that “all”, “none”,
“no-CATEGORY”, and “error” are not warning categories.
* bin/autoconf.in, bin/autoheader.in, bin/autom4te.in,
bin/autoreconf.in: Tweak --help text.
* tests/m4sugar.at (m4@&t@_warn (bad categories)): New test.
Commit c2ab755698 added an unconditional
use of Data::Dumper’s Sortkeys method, which was added in version
2.12_01 of that module. In terms of Perl versions, it is available in
5.8.x and later, and in 5.6.2, but not in 5.6.1 or earlier. At the
time, our minimum Perl version was 5.10, but we lowered it to 5.6.0
again in 05e295b60c. It seems that
commit was not actually tested with 5.6.1 or earlier.
As we are only using Sortkeys to facilitate manual comparison of
autom4te.cache/requests files, we can just ignore the method lookup
failure with 5.6.[01] and everything will work fine without it.
Tested on x86_64-unknown-netbsd9.3 with perl 5.6.1.
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm (marshall): Ignore method lookup failure for
Data::Dumper::Sortkeys with very old perl.
* lib/Autom4te/Request.pm (marshall): Likewise.
The Automake test suite wants this in order to know if it’s safe to
reduce the length of various delays for the purpose of ensuring files
in autom4te.cache are newer than the corresponding source files. We
can also take advantage of this to speed up a couple of tests in our
own testsuite.
* lib/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm: Provide (but do not export) a flag
$subsecond_mtime, indicating whether the ‘mtime’ function reports
modification time with precision greater than one second.
Reorganize commentary and import logic for clarity. Add
configuration for emacs’ perl-mode to the bottom of the file.
* bin/autom4te.in ($version): If $Autom4te::FileUtils::subsecond_mtime
is true, print “Features: subsecond-mtime” as the second line
of --version output.
* lib/autotest/general.m4: Move definitions of AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD,
AT_JOB_FIFO_IN_FD, and AT_JOB_FIFO_OUT_FD to top level and change
the latter two to be defined using _AT_DEFINE_INIT. This enables
use of AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD in AT_TESTS_PREPARE code.
* tests/local.at (AT_MTIME_DELAY): New utility that delays a test for
an appropriate time to ensure all files created before its use are
considered older than all files created afterward. The delay will
be as short as possible.
(AT_TESTS_PREPARE): Calculate and log the delay used by AT_MTIME_DELAY.
Only use a delay shorter than one second if the build filesystem,
our autom4te, and the automake on the PATH all support this.
(AT_CMP): En passant removal of unnecessary blank lines.
* tests/tools.at: Use AT_MTIME_DELAY, instead of sleeping for a
hardcoded interval, everywhere the delay was to control file
timestamps.
Commit 61901a1a14 dated 2022-07-10
bumped the Perl requirement to 5.10 or later, because
commit 3a9802d601 dated 2021-08-31
added code using Time::HiRes’s ‘stat’ function, a feature
added in Perl 5.8.9+ or Perl 5.10+, and it was hard
to find Perl 5.8.9 hosts to test with. Also, requiring Perl 5.10
meant that we could then use operators like Digest::SHA, the // and
//= operators, the regexp \K escape, and ‘state’ variables.
However, that Time::HiRes code, which was taken from Automake, has
recently been made optional by Automake, and it now works again with
Perl 5.6. And Autoconf is not yet using any other post-5.6 feature,
except when developers run help-extract.pl (something Autoconf users
do not use). So relax the Autoconf user requirement back to 5.6 as it
was in Autoconf 2.71; although Autoconf developers will need 5.10 or
better, Autoconf users can get by with 5.6.
I ran into this problem when testing the Autoconf release candidate on
Solaris 10, which has Perl 5.8.4. Oracle says Solaris 10’s
end-of-life is January 2024, so it’s still (barely) a viable porting
target. Of course with Solaris 10 one must install a recent-enough
GNU m4, but adding a requirement to also install a recent-enough Perl
is a new barrier, and if it’s not needed then it might be better to
wait until it is needed (or until 2024 arrives).
* NEWS: Update news item about Perl 5.6 vs 5.10.
* README-hacking: Bump Perl recommendation to 5.10.
* build-aux/fetch.pl: Do not munge imported code to require 5.10.
Notced unstable key order when debugging unrelated bug.
Data::Dumper's SortKeys() makes ordering stable and decreases
diffs from run to run. No functional change otherwise.
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Request.pm: Sort request keys in serialization.
Copyright-paperwork-exempt: yes
The minimum Perl version was raised to 5.8.0 from 5.6.0 in commit
3a9802d601 (but not documented as
such until e8c2d79ec4, and not
actually *enforced* by our own configure script until, er, now)
in order to use Time::HiRes::stat.
Unfortunately, while the Time::HiRes *module* was added in 5.8.0, it
did not export a ‘stat’ function until 5.8.9. More precisely, this
feature was added to Time::HiRes in version 1.92 of that module; Perl
core 5.8.8 shipped Time::HiRes 1.86, 5.8.9 shipped 1.9715. The only
system I have convenient access to, that has older Perls installed,
offers me a choice of 5.8.8 or 5.10.1, so the new requirement means
I cannot test with 5.8.x anymore.
Per https://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist the release history of these
versions of Perl is, in chronological order,
5.8.0 2002-Jul-18
5.8.8 2006-Jan-31
5.10.0 2007-Dec-18
5.8.9 2008-Dec-14 <-- almost a year later than 5.10.0
5.10.1 2009-Aug-22
5.12.0 2010-Apr-12
Per https://perldoc.perl.org/perl5101delta the differences between
5.10.0 and 5.10.1 are small, and do not make me worry about
accidentally introducing code that works on my test boxes but not for
our users, unlike the gulf between 5.8.x and 5.10.x.
Requiring 5.10 will mean that we have access to Digest::SHA, the //
and //= operators, the regexp \K escape, and ‘state’ variables
(lexical scope, persistent value) all of which I can think
of uses for (but none of them are actually used in this patch).
Putting it all together, I think a requirement bump to version 5.10.0
is justified. We are already chopping off the trailing edge at 2006
due to the requirement for M4 1.4.8 (/de facto/ since 2.70) and late
2007 is still 15 years ago.
This patch also makes configure search $PATH for executables named
‘perl5*’ and ‘perl-5.*’ if bare ‘perl’ is too old. To do this, it
introduces a helper macro AClocal_PATH_PROG_GLOBS_FEATURE_CHECK, which
I would *like* to promote to a new Autoconf feature, but I got stuck
on quoting issues — see comments in m4/perl-time-hires.m4.
* NEWS: Document requirement for Perl 5.10.
* m4/perl-time-hires.m4: New file.
* configure.ac: Use AC_PATH_PERL_WITH_TIME_HIRES_STAT to probe for
perl.
* build-aux/fetch.pl (fetch): For .pm files fetched from Automake,
rewrite “use 5.006” to “use 5.010”.
* build-aux/help-extract.pl
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm
* lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Channels.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Config.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Configure_ac.pm
* lib/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm
* lib/Autom4te/General.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Getopt.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Request.pm
* lib/Autom4te/XFile.pm
* tests/mktests.pl: Change “use 5.006” to “use 5.010”.
Autoconf’s diagnostics now follow current GNU coding standards,
which say that diagnostics in the C locale should quote 'like this'
with plain apostrophes instead of the older GNU style `like this'
with grave accent and apostrophe.
Several autotools programs use ‘do’ to evaluate Perl code
generated into a file in the temporary directory created by
Autom4te::General::mktmpdir. If the environment variable
TMPDIR is a relative path, mktmpdir will set $tmp to a
relative path and we’ll end up trying to ‘do’ a relative
path, which searches for the file in @INC. This doesn’t
work under perl 5.26 or later, because ‘.’ was removed
from @INC in that version (for security reasons).
Ensure that mktmpdir sets $tmp to an absolute pathname.
Also use File::Temp::tempdir to create the temporary
directory, instead of shelling out to ‘mktemp -d’;
this eliminates a subprocess and means we don’t have
to worry about cleaning up the directory on exit.
Problem found by Kent Fredric and reported as
<https://bugs.gentoo.org/625576>.
Supersedes Gentoo’s autoconf-2.69-perl-5.26-2.patch.
* lib/Autom4te/General.pm
(mktmpdir): Use File::Temp to create temporary directory.
Ensure that $tmp is an absolute path.
(END): No need to clean up $tmp.
* tests/tools.at (autotools and relative TMPDIR): New test.
This function merges a list of warnings categories into the environment
variable WARNINGS, returning a new value to set it to. The intended use
is in code of the form
{
local $ENV{WARNINGS} = merge_WARNINGS ("this", "that");
# run a command here with WARNINGS=this,that,etc
}
This is not used yet, but will be in the next patch.
* lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm (merge_WARNINGS): New function.
ChannelDefs.pm *ought* to be kept in sync between automake and autoconf,
because it defines the set of valid -W options, and autoreconf assumes
that it can pass arbitrary -W options to all of the tools it invokes.
However, it isn’t covered by either project’s ‘make fetch’ and it hasn’t
actually *been* in sync for more than 17 years.
This patch manually brings over all of the changes made on the
automake side. Once the complementary patch is applied by the
automake team, both versions of the file will be the same, and then we
can add it to the list in fetch.pl and not have this problem any more
in the future.
There are some user-visible consequences to bringing this file back
into sync. The only one worth mentioning in NEWS is that the ‘obsolete’
category of warnings is now on by default. This had quite a bit of
fallout throughout the testsuite. There are also some new warning
categories that get mentioned in --help output, but we don’t actually
generate any warnings in those categories, so people using ‘-Wall’
won’t see any change. More diagnostics are automatically tagged with
‘warning:’ or ‘error:’, which also had some fallout in the testsuite.
Finally, ‘-Werror’ no longer causes complaints about unknown warning
categories to be treated as hard errors.
Internally, there are some small API changes: ‘parse_warnings’ is no
longer usable as a ‘getopt’ callback function, and we now have a stub
Autom4te/Config.pm to match the automake code’s expectations. (This
file *should* also be synced from automake by ‘make fetch’, but we
can’t quite do that yet because it’s a generated file and our build
system is not prepared to handle adding *two* directories to @INC when
running a not-yet-installed Perl script. I plan to fix that after 2.70.)
As a side-effect of adding a Config.pm, ‘prog_error’ now says to
report the bug to bug-autoconf, not bug-automake. If this is why we
mostly haven’t been using prog_error for internal errors, we can stop
avoiding it. (I did not change anything to use prog_error in this
patch.)
* lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm: Merge from automake.
* lib/Autom4te/Config.pm: New file.
* lib/local.mk (dist_perllib_DATA): Add Autom4te/Config.pm.
* bin/autoconf.as: Update list of warning categories to match
Autom4te::ChannelDefs::usage.
* bin/autoheader.in (@warnings): New global.
(parse_args): Don’t use parse_warnings as a getopt callback.
(main): Add warnings options from our command line to $autoconf.
No need to turn on 'obsolete' warnings explicitly.
No need to include "warning: " in warning messages.
* bin/autom4te.in (parse_args): Don’t use parse_warnings as a getopt callback.
(main): No need to include "warning: " in warning messages.
* bin/autoreconf.in (parse_args): parse_warnings now takes only one argument.
* bin/autoupdate.in: Set WARNINGS=none in environment for all child processes.
* tests/local.at
(AT_CHECK_M4): Handle `autom4te: error: /usr/bin/m4 ...` like
`autom4te: /usr/bin/m4 ...`.
(_AT_CHECK_AC_MACRO): Add AUTOCONF-FLAGS argument, passed to both
autoconf and autoheader.
(AT_CHECK_MACRO): Default AUTOCONF-FLAGS argument to empty.
Pass that argument to autoheader as well as autoconf.
(AT_CHECK_AU_MACRO): Expect a “macro ‘NAME’ is obsolete’ diagnostic
on the first run of autoconf. Pass -Wno-obsolete to autoconf on the
second run, and to autoheader on both runs.
* tests/base.at
* tests/c.at
* tests/compile.at
* tests/m4sh.at
* tests/m4sugar.at
* tests/semantics.at
* tests/tools.at
* tests/torture.at:
No need to pass -Wobsolete to autoconf.
Pass -Wno-obsolete to autoheader where needed to avoid handling
the same warning twice.
Update various expectations for diagnostics to match behavior
changes.
* tests/tools.at (autoupdating AU_ALIAS): Add an AC_CONFIG_HEADERS
line to the test configure.ac to eliminate an unrelated diagnostic.
At file scope of a file containing at most one ‘package’ declaration,
‘use vars’ is exactly equivalent to ‘our’, and the latter is preferred
starting with Perl 5.6.0, which happens to be the oldest version we
support.
In one place ‘our’ was not actually necessary and was switched to ‘my’.
(This change has already been made in Automake and applied to the
shared Perl code via the previous ‘make fetch’ commit.)
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm
* lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm
* lib/Autom4te/General.pm: Replace all uses of ‘use vars’ with ‘our’.
* bin/autoheader.in: Replace all uses of ‘use vars’ with ‘our’.
Remove an unnecessary ‘local’.
* bin/autoscan.in: Convert ‘use vars’ variables to ‘my’ variables.
Search-and-replace change ‘use warnings;’ to ‘use warnings FATAL => 'all';’
in all Perl code.
Notwithstanding the dire cautions in ‘perldoc warnings’ about this,
I think it’s the right call for us. One file was already doing it.
No new testsuite failures are observed on Linux with Perl 5.30.3
nor on NetBSD with Perl 5.6.1.
* bin/autoheader.in, bin/autom4te.in, bin/autoreconf.in
* bin/autoscan.in, bin/autoupdate.in, bin/ifnames.in
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm, lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Channels.pm, lib/Autom4te/Configure_ac.pm
* lib/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm, lib/Autom4te/General.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Request.pm, lib/Autom4te/XFile.pm:
Make all warnings from the Perl interpreter into fatal errors.
Autom4te::XFile does not appear to have any use for Carp, DynaLoader,
or File::Basename.
This happened to catch my eye while I was doing the previous two
patches. I have not done a comprehensive audit of imports in the Perl
code.
* lib/Autom4te/XFile.pm: Remove ‘use’s of Carp, DynaLoader,
and File::Basename.
(@ISA): Remove DynaLoader.
All the Perl scripts and modules now ‘use’ other modules in the
following order:
- use 5.006; use strict; use warnings; in that order.
If a file was not already use-ing one of these three, it was added.
- The BEGIN block that adds the installation directory for the
Autom4te:: modules to @INC, if necessary.
- All stdlib modules whose name begins with a capital letter,
in ASCII sort order.
- All Autom4te:: modules, in ASCII sort order.
- ‘use vars qw (...)’, if any, last.
Also, ‘use foo qw (...)’ and @ISA lists have been sorted into ASCII
sort order. (@EXPORT lists, which often follow immediately after @ISA
lists, have *not* been sorted, as these appear to have been organized
semantically in many cases.) qw delimiters have been normalized to
round parentheses with a space between the qw and the open paren.
* bin/autoheader.in, bin/autom4te.in, bin/autoreconf.in
* bin/autoscan.in, bin/autoupdate.in, bin/ifnames.in
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm, lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Channels.pm, lib/Autom4te/Configure_ac.pm
* lib/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm, lib/Autom4te/General.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Getopt.pm, lib/Autom4te/Request.pm
* lib/Autom4te/XFile.pm: Rationalize order and format of ‘use’
directives and @ISA lists. Add any of ‘use 5.006’, ‘use strict’,
and ‘use warnings’ that was not already present.
Some downstream redistributors for Autoconf wish to use
‘/usr/bin/env perl’ as the #! line for the installed Perl scripts.
This does not work with command-line options on the #! line, as the
kernel doesn’t support supplying more than one argument to a #!
interpreter (this limitation is universal across Unixes that
support #!, as far as I know).
Remove ‘-w’ from all perl #! lines and instead add ‘use warnings’
to all the scripts and .pm files that didn’t already have it.
This ‘use’ directive was added to Perl in version 5.6.0 (aka 5.006)
so there is no change to our minimum Perl requirement.
(It is necessary to add ‘use warnings’ to all the .pm files as well as
the scripts, because the ‘-w’ command-line option turns on warnings
globally, but ‘use warnings’ does so only for the current lexical scope.)
Patch uplifted from OpenEmbedded, originally by Serhii Popovych.
It’s a mechanical search-and-replace change so I do not believe a
copyright assignment is necessary.
* bin/autom4te.in, bin/autoreconf.in, bin/autoscan.in
* bin/autoupdate.in, bin/ifnames.in: Remove -w from #! line
and add ‘use warnings’ to imports.
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm, lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Channels.pm, lib/Autom4te/Configure_ac.pm
* lib/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm, lib/Autom4te/General.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Request.pm, lib/Autom4te/XFile.pm:
Add ‘use warnings’ to imports.
Problem reported in <https://bugs.debian.org/219621>.
* bin/autom4te.in: Save and check autom4te version number into cache index.
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm (save): New arg $version. All callers changed.
(good_version): New sub.
Problem reported by Bruno Haible in:
https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?109406
* lib/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm (update_file): Use rename + system
instead of move, since move truncates file timestamps.
Done via 'make update-copyright', since all files are effectively
modified and distributed this year via public version control.
* all files: Update copyright year.
* build-aux/config.guess: This file.
* lib/Autom4te/Channels.pm: And this one.
* maint.mk: And this one.
Signed-off-by: Stefano Lattarini <stefano.lattarini@gmail.com>
Done via 'make update-copyright', since all files are effectively
modified and distributed this year via public version control.
* all files: Update copyright year.
It has been years since that has been deprecated in the documentation,
in favour of 'configure.ac':
Previous versions of Autoconf promoted the name configure.in, which
is somewhat ambiguous (the tool needed to process this file is not
described by its extension), and introduces a slight confusion with
config.h.in and so on (for which '.in' means "to be processed by
configure"). Using configure.ac is now preferred.
It's now time to start giving runtime warning about the use of
'configure.in', so that support for it can be removed in future
versions of autoconf/automake.
* lib/Autom4te/Configure_ac.pm: Issue a warning in the 'obsolete'
category if 'configure.in' is detected. Since this module is synced
from Automake, this change is to be backported there (and will be
soon).
* doc/autoconf.texi: Update.
* tests/tools.at: Adjust to avoid spurious failures.
Signed-off-by: Stefano Lattarini <stefano.lattarini@gmail.com>
* lib/Autom4te/General.pm: This file is *not* used by Automake;
adjust comments accordingly.
Signed-off-by: Stefano Lattarini <stefano.lattarini@gmail.com>
This reduces the implicit requirement from 5.6.2 back to 5.6,
while raising the explicit requirement to match the actual code.
* configure.ac (PERL): Fail up front if perl is too old.
* NEWS: Document this.
* README: Likewise.
* README-hacking: Likewise.
* lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm: Bump requirement.
* lib/Autom4te/General.pm: Relax requirement.
