[darcs-users] Autoconf broken in 2.3?

[Petr Rockai]

Hi folks,

I have tried to build 2.3.0rc1 with autoconf today, however, darcs binaries
produced by autoconf currently say, for --version: when built from repository,
2.3.0rc1 (FIXME). When built from tarball, they even say 2.2.0 (FIXME).

This is blocks release of the autoconf tarballs. Since there are no other
changes than this since beta 4, there are now two options:

- release on time, skipping the rc altogether (the beta 4 is effectively a
  release candidate)
- delay the release until someone fixes the autoconf build, then make an rc and
  a final, auoconf support included

There are some caveats with autoconf, like when people have the wrong version
of hashed-storage on their system, the build may produce broken darcs (the
build will fail with a GHC error in the better case), but I don't expect to
have that fixed -- a common-case build that works and gives proper version
information would be enough for an autoconf-enabled release.

Nevertheless, this puts the 2.3 release in a pretty bad shape, since we don't
have the manual without autoconf. So if no-one steps in, I will drop autoconf
from 2.3, together with the user manual building abilities (I have previously
declared that I won't actively waste time on autoconf). Amends may be done in
later 2.3.x releases.

Yours,
   Petr.

PS: Darcs managed to produce annotation of configure.ac after a while, and the
offending line seems to be this:

# Following line added by [Have autoconf forget about .hs.in.
# Trent W. Buck <trentbuck at gmail.com>**20090126125644
 Ignore-this: 4fa6a3ce806c726dcaec5771d3059c8b
]
 AC_DEFINE(PACKAGE_VERSION_STATE,"FIXME")