How can Autoconf help with the transition to stricter compilation defaults?

[Zack Weinberg via cfe-commits]

Sam James <sam at gentoo.org> writes:

>> On 12 Nov 2022, at 03:40, Zack Weinberg <zack at owlfolio.org> wrote:
>> This is definitely more work than I can see myself doing on a volunteer
>> basis, but a 2.69.1 patch release — nothing that’s not already on trunk,
>> cherry pick the changes needed to support the newer compilers (and
>> also newer Perl and Bash and M4) is a thing that could happen.
>
> I didn't want to ask you to do this because I felt fortunate enough
> you were volunteering to handle 2.72, but this would indeed be a help,
> because then I won't have to try persuade people they should totally upgrade,
> and it should happen naturally enough with distro upgrades.

To be clear, I am *not* volunteering to do this.  It would be
significantly more work than I can carve out the time for.

Whoever does this will need to go through the *entire* list of changes
since the original 2.69 release, to find all of the changes that improve
compatibility with newer versions of tools, disentangle each from any
other changes applied in the same commit, and then do a whole lot of
testing.  It’s tedious, and whoever does it should get paid to do it.
I’m guessing at least one full 40-hour week of work, and you should
budget for three times that, going by how much more work the 2.70
release was than we anticipated.

I can *advise* anyone who takes on the job, and review their changes,
but that’s it.

zw