On Jul 22, 2016, at 09:01, Xavier de Gaye <xdegaye@gmail.com> wrote:
It seems that the configure file on the default branch has been generated with autoconf 2.70. Autoconf 2.70 has not yet been released [1]. The differences between the generated configure files with 2.69 and 2.70 are a few lines [3] added by 2.70 with 'runstatedir' in them. The last old discussion on the usage of different autoconf versions [2] does not really answer the following question:
I am using 2.69, should a commit that changes configure.ac respects the existing 'runstatedir' lines added by a previous commit or uses directly the configure file generated by 2.69 ?
It looks like Matthias used a 2.70 for this commit:
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/78d2cb7f66b6
thus probably inadvertently introducing the unused "runstatedir" stuff.
Since 2.69 is the current version, it's fine to "auto-remove" them.
IIRC, some years ago when autoconf was releasing more often and there were multiple versions in use, we had a test in configure.ac to ensure that a particular version of autoconf was being used. That doesn't seem to be necessary but it's something to keep in mind if we do start seeing on-going problems with autoconf churn.
-- Ned Deily nad@python.org -- []