[tlbuild] Old versions of autoconf

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Sat, 26 Mar 2011, Ken Brown wrote:

> Most of the texlive build system uses autoconf 2.68, but there are still a 
> few places where older versions were used.  Two in particular affect the 
> Cygwin build, because the autoconf mmap test (AC_FUNC_MMAP) was broken until 
> autoconf 2.65 and incorrectly failed on Cygwin. ...

Hi Ken,

we use autoconf 2.68 in TL for source/, source/*/, and source/*/*/, but not
for independently maintained packages such as dialog, dvipng, freetype,
freetype2, and others.  Even for these we frequently use a proxy build
system (e.g., texk/dvipng/configure and texk/dvipng/Makefile) and ignore the
original ones (in texk/dvipng/dvipng-1.14/), but there are some exceptions:
   libs/freetype/freetype-1.5/configure (2.61a)
   libs/freetype2/freetype-2.4.3/builds/unix/configure (2.65)
   libs/icu/icu-4.6/configure (2.67)
   utils/dialog/dialog-1.1-20110302/configure (2.52.20101002)
The main reason is, that a proxy build system would be too complicated.

Freetype-1.5 is not actively maintained and I couldn't even find an upstream
source (only freetype-1.3.1.tar.gz), so maybe 1.5 was never released, just
modifications in the teTeX/TL tree used to build ttf2pk?  Here we could
certainly (try to) rebuild configure with autoconf 2.68.

The same might be possible for freetype-2.4.3 (again for freetype-2.4.4) and
dialog-1.1-20110302, but in the last case I am not at all sure if that would
succeed.

If you want, please try and report the results.  If that can be done for ALL
these cases (not counting icu) we could adopt this for the TL tree.

Regards
Peter Breitenlohner <peb at mppmu.mpg.de>