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Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 01:08:05 +0200
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Subject: Why the autoconf <= 2.59 check?
From: edwin@minian.org (Edwin van Vliet)

In commit 09e803c it is unfortunately unclear exactly why support for
"newer" autoconf is somehow dropped. Since autoconf 2.60 was released
Mon, 26 Jun 2006, this means PHP 5.3.8 needs to be built with software
more than 5 years old. By itself this is not necessarily a problem, but
for example CentOS 6.0 comes with version 2.63.
Ok, 2.13 is also available, but trying to use that (as suggested) breaks
quite a lot, a lot of macro's are not expanded correctly in configure.in.

Actually modifying buildcheck.sh (sed -i '/exit 1/d') resolved the issue
and it builds just fine using 2.63, without any apparent problems.

Now I'm not really sure whether we can release the software package I
just built, since there must be some kind of reason to create a test for
autoconf >= 2.59. I cannot seem to find that reason and this greatly
disturbs me. Only clue is the commit message by rasmus:

https://github.com/php/php-src/commit/09e803c389224e7f7ea8fc18ab8e14a0894dc003

> Fix autoconf version check script to make sure people are
> not using 2.60 or higher here. It might actually work up to
> 2.62 or 2.64. If someone could verify that these versions
> still work I can massage this further.

I think this commit message fails to address which bug it's supposed to
fix. Furthermore, the ChangeLog at http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php
doesn't say anything about resolving possible build issues.

Could somebody please elaborate?