Re: diffutils 2.8.1's configure breaks on IRIX 5.3 and others

[Paul Eggert]

Georg Schwarz <address@hidden> writes:

> > Thanks for your bug report; I think using an upgraded
> > Autoconf/Automake should fix that automatically, so no change
> > to the diffutils source itself should be needed.
> 
> in fact I was compiling diffutils as part of NetBSD pkgsrc-current.
> I would assume their automake and autoconf to be pretty current.

Did they actually use their automake and autoconf to rebuild
'configure', 'Makefile.in', etc.?  You can determine this by comparing
their sources to the ftp.gnu.org version.  If they didn't use their
automake and autoconf, or if they used an old automake and autoconf,
that might explain the problem.  Current versions are 1.8.2 and 2.59,
respectively.

> Any suggestions what I could do to further pin down the problem?

Your workaround for diffutils looks reasonable already, but if your
goal is to track down autoconf/automake problems, you might start with
the latest alpha version
<ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/diffutils/diffutils-2.8.4.tar.gz>, touch
(say) m4/vararrays.m4 and then run 'make; make distclean; sh
configure; make'.