Subject: [bug#61240] [PATCH 2/2] Gracefully degrade if Time::HiRes is not available

From: Jacob Bachmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2023 21:36:14 -0500

Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 2023-03-28 08:21, Warren Young wrote:
>> Surely Solaris 10 (shipped in 2005) is relegated to the role of 
>> porting target, getting nothing but a “dist” tarball?
>
> Good point. I'll cc this to Dagobert Michelsen, who maintains the 
> Autoconf port for Solaris 10. Dagobert, are people still running 
> Autoconf on Solaris 10? If not, worrying about porting to older Perl 
> should be even lower priority than it already is.
>
> For context, this email is about GNU bug 61240:
>
> https://bugs.gnu.org/61240
>
> and the fallout that the latest Autoconf release candidate does not 
> run on the old version of Perl installed by default on Solaris 10. See:
>
> https://lists.gnu.org/r/autoconf/2023-03/msg00030.html
>
> If OpenCSW already installs a new-enough Perl version then this 
> Autoconf business shouldn't be a real issue. On the other hand if it's 
> really trivial to keep Autoconf portable to older Perl, and if Jacob 
> Bachmeyer or some other Perl expert can vouch for the change, we might 
> as well put it in.

I have since checked and it appears that the same patch I submitted for 
Automake on this bug should also work for Autoconf, applied atop commit 
3a9802d60156809c139e9b4620bf04917e143ee2 (also back out the change to 
"use 5.008" in that commit, which was bogus for the same reasons I have 
previously explained for the Perl version requirement bump in 
Automake).  Autoconf would also do well to revert commit 
61901a1a14fd50c03cfb1529d091554376fef286 and/or possibly split 
m4/perl-time-hires.m4 out of that commit and remove the "use 5.010;" 
line from it; the correct test is for a perl that has Time::HiRes::stat, 
not for any specific version of perl.  I find this particularly grating 
in Autoconf, where the entire point is supposed to be "test for 
features, not versions".  :-/

-- Jacob