Hi Ben, Ben Pfaff wrote: > This package is really obsolete. It has several bug reports but the > right thing to do is probably to get any packages that use autoconf2.13 > updated to use something else. (Or removed; they are antiques > themselves.)
While I hoped that you are right, there seem at least two big blockers on a first glance: Firefox and Thunderbird. I tried to make a quick list of affected packages: → grep-dctrl -s Package -FBuild-Depends,Build-Depends-Indep,Build-Depends-Arch autoconf2.13 /var/lib/apt/lists/*Source* | fgrep Package | sort -u Package: firefox Package: firefox-esr Package: gcc-3.3 Package: gcc-m68hc1x Package: grass Package: maxima Package: mozjs52 Package: mozjs78 Package: postgis Package: thunderbird Package: vflib3 Package: xemacs21 And yeah, some packages in this list are really old. gcc-3.3 recently has been orphaned for similar reasons: https://bugs.debian.org/966317 So I tried to figure out which versions of Firefox and Thunderbird exactly are affected and it started to look less bad: → apt-cache showsrc firefox firefox-esr thunderbird | egrep 'Package:|autoconf|Version:|^$' | sed -e 's/autoconf2\.13.*/autoconf2\.13, …/g' Package: firefox Version: 81.0-2 Build-Depends: autotools-dev, debhelper (>= 9.20160114), autoconf2.13, … Standards-Version: 3.9.8.0 Package: firefox Version: 82.0.3-1 Standards-Version: 3.9.8.0 Package: firefox Version: 83.0-1 Standards-Version: 3.9.8.0 Package: firefox Version: 84.0-1 Standards-Version: 3.9.8.0 Package: firefox-esr Version: 78.5.0esr-1 Build-Depends: autotools-dev, debhelper (>= 9.20160114), autoconf2.13, … Standards-Version: 3.9.8.0 Package: firefox-esr Version: 78.6.0esr-1 Build-Depends: autotools-dev, debhelper (>= 9.20160114), autoconf2.13, … Standards-Version: 3.9.8.0 Package: thunderbird Version: 1:78.5.1-1 Build-Depends: autoconf2.13, … Standards-Version: 4.5.1 Package: thunderbird Version: 1:78.6.0-1 Build-Depends: autoconf2.13, … Standards-Version: 4.5.1 Package: thunderbird Version: 1:84.0~b3-1 Build-Depends: autoconf2.13, … Standards-Version: 4.5.1 So while the current Firefox-ESR and Thunderbird are affected, the Firefox from version 82 onwards seem to no more be affected. (The list contains versions from Unstable, Experimental and Testing.) But then again Thunderbird 84 still is using autoconf2.13. So hopefully the latter can be fixed by just replacing the build-dependency and maybe some minor other tweaks. So in the end, removing autoconf2.13 doesn't look too hard, but still might need some time and work. Regards, Axel -- ,''`. | Axel Beckert <[email protected]>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/ : :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin `. `' | 4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329 6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5 `- | 1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486 202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE
