debian broken?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 08:42, D. Peter Siddons wrote:
> Hi Ralf,
>     As a matter of curiosity, what especially do you find problematic 
> with Debian installations?

I am not criticizing Debian as a whole, I was referring to their
autoconf/automake packages only.

>   I have used Debian for almost as long as it 
> existed and not found particular difficulty.
> Pete.
> 
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>  >and most users have installed and because some vendors ship
>  >broken or malfunctioning (esp. Debian) versions.

Debian ships (shipped?) a patched version of autoconf, which applies a
wrapper script to guess on the version of autoconf required by configure
scripts. These guesses are based on heuristics and naturally sometimes
fail.

I am not using Debian myself, but I know that the Debian heuristics fail
on certain versions of gcc's configure scripts (Newer versions had
explicitly been adapted to let these heuristic succeed) and had been
reported to fail on RTEMS configure-scripts. 

May-be the Debian folks have improved their heuristics, may-be something
in RTEMS configure scripts has changed to let their heuristics succeed.
I don't know why you don't seem to have tripped over this problem.

You could try to run autoreconf or autoconf in one of the RTEMS's
source-tree's subdirectories and watch for what's going to happen. If
this succeeds, then this problem probably has been solved.

[Cygwin also ships (shipped?) a patched autoconf, which had similar
problems.]

Ralf