Re: How can Autoconf help with the transition to stricter compilation defaults?

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 2022-11-11 15:25, Sam James wrote:
> That's not a judgement on whether the changes will ultimately remain in autoconf, I'm just
> hesitant to allow a discussion I've kicked off to derail something that we were planning
> on doing anyway.
> 
> What do you think?

I'm hesitant to do that partly because the changes to _TIME_BITS are 
already released in multiple packages and need to be dealt with, 
regardless of whether they're backed out of Autoconf. This is because 
they've been in Gnulib since July and several packages based on these 
Gnulib changes have been released since then. Current Gnulib assumes 
these changes will appear in the next Autoconf release; if that's not 
true, we'll need to upgrade Gnulib and in the meantime the other 
packages released since July would still have the changes whatever we do 
with Gnulib and/or Autoconf.

Since distros need to deal with the issue anyway, regardless of what 
Autoconf and/or Gnulib does, I don't see why backing the changes out of 
Autoconf will help all that much.

It should pretty easy for a distro to say "hold on, I don't want 64-bit 
time_t yet" without changing either Autoconf or Gnulib so if you want to 
go that route please feel free to do so.