an update to automake-1.11?

[Kevin Kofler]

Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Now, why don't you explain why, and we'll go from there. Presuming that
> this is needed because some script in $srcdir uses the PERL environment
> variable, or a later part of the configure script itself (it assumes that
> PERL is set in the environment) then I would just patch in:
> 
> PERL=/usr/bin/perl
> export PERL
> 
> instead, to configure.

This is a really dirty hack and cannot be upstreamed. Fixing configure.ac is
the clean fix.

> Like I said earlier, there seems to be a meme going around that making a
> minor fix to configure is an impossible task. It can't be done, the only
> option is to fix configure.ac, and rerun autoconf. configure itself is
> untouchable. You can't patch it, you have to patch configure.ac, and then
> regenerate it.

That "meme" goes around for a reason, patching a generated file is dirty,
can be hard to do depending on what you want to patch, leads to patches
which can't be upstreamed and, if the source code is GPLed, violates the
GPL.

        Kevin Kofler