Mailing List Archive: About our autoconf problems

First thanks to Stefan for downgrading his release system. It is a good
workaround for the observed problems.

Since downgrades are not a long term solution, here's the status info to
avoid confusion.

We observed two problems that had to do with using a recent autoconf
version (2.70 an above) during releasing:

- bundled APR configure broken (ongoing)

This is already fixed by adjusting one of our autoconf macros in APR
1.7.x and trunk (I think not in 1.6.x). But we didn't have an APR
release since a long time, so the deps tarball for httpd still contains
the latest but unfixed APR version. Once we will have a new APR release
und bundle that, this autoconf problem will be gone and the latest
autoconf should again be fine.

- thread local detection broken in httpd.h (fixed)

This is not a configure time problem, but a compile time problem. But it
is still related to configure, because since autoconf 2.70 our call to
AC_PROG_CC also checks whether the compiler support C11. For some gcc
versions, eg. 4.8.x, this leads in "-std=gnu11" being added to the
compiler flags. This in combination with httpd.h in 2.4.53-rc1 lead to a
compile time failure. That problem is now fixed by making httpd.h more
robust, so fir that problem the downgrade is no longer needed.

Thanks and regards,

Rainer

On 3/10/22 9:09 AM, Rainer Jung wrote:
> First thanks to Stefan for downgrading his release system. It is a good workaround for the observed problems.
>
> Since downgrades are not a long term solution, here's the status info to avoid confusion.
>
> We observed two problems that had to do with using a recent autoconf version (2.70 an above) during releasing:
>
> - bundled APR configure broken (ongoing)
>
> This is already fixed by adjusting one of our autoconf macros in APR 1.7.x and trunk (I think not in 1.6.x). But we didn't have an
> APR release since a long time, so the deps tarball for httpd still contains the latest but unfixed APR version. Once we will have
> a new APR release und bundle that, this autoconf problem will be gone and the latest autoconf should again be fine.
>
> - thread local detection broken in httpd.h (fixed)
>
> This is not a configure time problem, but a compile time problem. But it is still related to configure, because since autoconf
> 2.70 our call to AC_PROG_CC also checks whether the compiler support C11. For some gcc versions, eg. 4.8.x, this leads in
> "-std=gnu11" being added to the compiler flags. This in combination with httpd.h in 2.4.53-rc1 lead to a compile time failure.

But isn't this a bug in autoconf to add this as 4.8.x does not implement C11? Or should we blame it on gcc 4.8.x to accept
-std=gnu11 if it doesn't implement this?
Irrespective of the answers to the the questions above it is good that we have the fix in httpd.h.

Regards

Rüdiger