mainAutoconf - Support: sr #110324, autoupdate does some nonsensical...

 
 

sr #110324: autoupdate does some nonsensical changes

Submitter:  Bruno Haible <haible>
Submitted:  Sun 04 Oct 2020 10:34:05 PM UTC
Votes: 2
 
Priority:  * 1 - Blocked Severity:  3 - Normal
Status:  Need Info Privacy:  Public
Assigned to:  None Open/Closed:  Open
Operating System:  None
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Sun 10 Dec 2023 10:42:48 PM UTC, comment #7: 

comment #6:

> Still waiting for those minimized reproduction recipes for erroneous changes, and probably also for a volunteer who really wants to take a deep dive on autoupdate.


I've been meaning to reduce a testcase for this, but haven't gotten any further than setting up the directories for it; sorry... still on my TODO list...

Eric Gallager <egallager>
Fri 08 Dec 2023 01:59:38 PM UTC, comment #6: 

Still waiting for those minimized reproduction recipes for erroneous changes, and probably also for a volunteer who really wants to take a deep dive on autoupdate.

Zack Weinberg <zackw>
Group administrator
Mon 13 Jun 2022 03:26:15 PM UTC, comment #5: 

Yes, minimized reproduction recipes for erroneous changes would be really helpful.

I can't promise autoupdate will ever get fixed, both because of a general lack of developer time, and because I'm not convinced it's possible to fix some of these bugs short of a ground-up redesign built around an actual parser for both M4 and shell constructs.  (See the long comment starting at https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/autoconf.git/tree/bin/autoupdate.in#n420 for a bunch of backstory -- what we have now is the fifth attempt to design an auto-updater, and it's still got these problems!)  But right now all we have is anecdotes coupled to long diffs like the ones you and Bruno posted.  Minimized reproduction recipes would let us think concretely about how the existing algorithm goes wrong and figure out what, if anything, can be done about it.

Zack Weinberg <zackw>
Group administrator
Sun 12 Jun 2022 11:52:21 PM UTC, comment #4: 

comment #3:

> Since autoupdate uses a "brittle" algorithm, as Zack wrote, I think what you report will be hard or impossible to reproduce if you don't attach the input file(s).


Hi, the input files can be found in my "autotools-tinkering" branch of gcc: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/compare/master...cooljeanius:me/autotools-tinkering
In particular commit 6b44b2c contains a lot of the screw-ups: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commit/6b44b2c391c1132acc8cfdefe83e2e614b8e590d
I can try reducing some reproducers from it if you'd like; should I?

Eric Gallager <egallager>
Sun 12 Jun 2022 06:20:15 PM UTC, comment #3: 

Since autoupdate uses a "brittle" algorithm, as Zack wrote, I think what you report will be hard or impossible to reproduce if you don't attach the input file(s).

Bruno Haible <haible>
Sun 12 Jun 2022 05:34:20 PM UTC, comment #2: 

I've noticed a bunch of these, too:

1) Nested AC_TRY_COMPILE/AC_TRY_LINK/AC_TRY_RUN invocations lead to stray _au_m4_changequote([,])s when being autoupdated to AC_COMPILE_IF_ELSE/AC_LINK_IF_ELSE/AC_RUN_IF_ELSE
2) Macros in comments get expanded even when the new output spreads across more lines, meaning that stuff that ought to stay in a comment no longer is
3) Stuff inside AC_REQUIRE gets autoupdated even when that breaks the usage of AC_REQUIRE (similar to the previous)
4) If someone had been writing their configure.ac to abide by certain style rules (e.g. 80-character line limits), autoupdate will ignore those and reformat things

I've been noticing a bunch of these while autoupdating various stuff over the years but am only getting around to writing them down as of my beginning of work on autoupdating the GCC configury as per this bug: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=103459

Should I open separate bugs for each additional item that I notice, or just continue to catalogue them here?

Eric Gallager <egallager>
Fri 30 Oct 2020 08:47:57 PM UTC, comment #1: 

Regrettably, I do not think it will be possible to make any improvements to autoupdate for 2.70.  The algorithm it uses is already extremely brittle and I'm buried in regressions in automake itself.

Zack Weinberg <zackw>
Group administrator
Sun 04 Oct 2020 10:34:05 PM UTC, original submission:  

In https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2020-09/msg00158.html Zack Weinberg wrote:
"The diff produced by autoupdate is mostly not usable as is.   In fact, it looks to me more like a todo list for bugs and missing features in autoupdate itself :-/"

Here is another example, from GNU gperf. Find the input and the changes by autoupdate 2.69c attached.

1) Changing AC_PREREQ([2.64]) to AC_PREREQ([2.69c]) — or, once 2.70 is released, to AC_PREREQ([2.70]) — is unwelcome, because many distros which run autoreconf will not have autoconf 2.70 is installed.
While it is certainly OK to change AC_PREREQ([2.13]) to AC_PREREQ([2.64]) or so, AC_PREREQ([2.69c]) is a too strong requirement.

2) Changing AC_LANG_SAVE() to m4_warn(...) is nonsense.

3) Leaving AC_LANG_SAVE in the output is not good, because autoupdate is meant to eliminate this call.

The other parts are helpful, though.

Bruno Haible <haible>

 

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Attached Files
file #49921:  configure.ac.diff added by haible (1KiB - text/x-patch)
file #49920:  configure.ac added by haible (2KiB - application/octet-stream)

 

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    Follow 5 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2023-12-08 zackw StatusNone Need Info
    2023-07-14 egallager Carbon-Copy- Added egallager
    2020-10-30 zackw Priority5 - Unprioritized 1 - Blocked
    2020-10-04 haible Attached File- Added configure.ac.diff, #49921
    2020-10-04 haible Attached File- Added configure.ac, #49920

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