Thanks for the comment!

> > For these two scripts, the thing is that autotools vendors them, and
> > they can get stuck a bit behind in the past. They've had a handful of
> > patches lately, improving Windows support.
>
> We don't stick to a specific version of autotools. Those products of 
> autotools are there for
> convenience for others who don't have autotools installed; they can be 
> arbitrarily overwritten by
> whatever happens to exist on a build machine.

I don't think that's entirely correct. The `configure.ac` scripts are
specific to a project and require a minimum version of autoconf (see
`AC_PREREQ` [1]). When updating to autoconf-2.71 I found just one
deprecation warning in winpthreads/. These scripts never get updated
automatically, they're written by project authors.
The `configure` scripts only get updated if the user runs `autogen` or
`autoreconf`. Note that packagers typically don't regenerate configure
if the project already provides it, see for instance the winpthreads
package in Arch Linux [2].
If the project already provides `configure`, it's unlikely anyone will
regenerate it, which is why I think there's value in providing a
regenerated `configure` from the latest autotools. A lot of work has
been done between 2.69 and 2.71, see "Rejuvenating Autotools" [3].
There are also precedents in mingw-w64's history (which prompted me to
submit these patches):
- 
https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/mingw-w64/ci/18dd4b31a2b89c9ffc2d4bf60585785cf73031bc/
- 
https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/mingw-w64/ci/e6921b2c26836f3788a4516c40e2bdd1b825a136/

> So, there is no need to send separate patches for them; they will get updated 
> sooner or later - for
> example, when MSYS2 has the versions you've proposed.

MSYS2 already has the latest automake/autoconf!

[1]: 
https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.71/html_node/Versioning.html
[2]: 
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/mingw-w64-winpthreads/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD?ref_type=heads
[3]: https://lwn.net/Articles/834682/

Best regards,
-- Antonin


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