On Fri, Mar 6, 2026, at 11:05 AM, Ross Burton wrote:
> diffstat-1.68 fails to autoreconfig with this release.
>
> The existing tarball has a hand-written config.h.in that is just
> "@DEFS@" and configure turns that into config.h, expanding @DEFS@ into
> the #defines.

The configure script in the diffstat-1.68 tarball was generated by a
modified fork of autoconf 2.52, maintained by the author of diffstat;
see <https://invisible-island.net/autoconf/autoconf.html>.  Applying
autoreconf from *any* released version of GNU autoconf to this tarball
will produce a configure script that doesn't work, or works only by
luck.  In particular, using @DEFS@ in config.h.in relies on a feature
added by the fork.  Therefore, I think the 2.73(-to-be) autoheader is
*correct* to refuse to overwrite this config_h.in.

If you want to regenerate the diffstat configure script, I think you 
need to use the forked autoconf.  A tarball is linked from the bottom
of the page above.  However, based on what it says on this page, I
think you should probably not bother regenerating it unless you
actually need to patch configure.in.  This presumably applies to
all of Thomas Dickey's software, not just diffstat.

I'm cc:ing Thomas in case he can offer further clarification.

zw

    • Re: Pl... Nick Bowler
    • Re: Pl... Zack Weinberg
      • Re... Bruno Haible via Discussion list for the autoconf build system
        • ... Nick Bowler
        • ... Richard Purdie
      • Re... Nick Bowler
        • ... Zack Weinberg
          • ... Ross Burton
          • ... Richard Purdie
  • Re: Please ... Ross Burton
    • Re: Pl... Zack Weinberg
  • Re: Please ... Bruno Haible via Discussion list for the autoconf build system
    • Re: Pl... Zack Weinberg
      • Re... Bruno Haible via Discussion list for the autoconf build system
      • Re... Bruno Haible via Discussion list for the autoconf build system
        • ... Bruno Haible via Discussion list for the autoconf build system
        • ... Zack Weinberg
          • ... Bruno Haible via Discussion list for the autoconf build system
          • ... Zack Weinberg
            • ... Bruno Haible via Discussion list for the autoconf build system

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