Subject: Re: bug#67891: automake-1.16i doesn't build on Solaris 10 sparc

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2023 16:03:39 -0800

On 2023-12-19 14:54, Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Paul,
> 
>      help2man: can't get `--help' info from bin/automake
>      Try `--no-discard-stderr' if option outputs to stderr
> 
> So, the obvious question is, why can't help2man run bin/automake?
> Clearly it works on other systems, and it doesn't seem like this should
> be especially system-dependent. Can you run bin/automake --help by hand?

$ bin/automake --help
Unrecognized escape \K passed through at bin/automake line 8135.

Here's line 8135:

       $output =~ s/^((#.*)?\n)*\K/.POSIX:\n\n/;

Solaris 10 'perl --version' says it's Perl v5.8.4. v5.8.4 is dated 2004 
but \K was added in v5.10, according to:

https://metacpan.org/release/RGARCIA/perl-5.10.0/view/pod/perl5100delta.pod#K-escape

'configure' says perl v5.6 is required and v5.10 is recommended, so 
v5.8.4 should work even if not recommended. v5.6 came out in 2000, 
v5.8.4 in 2004, v5.10 in 2007; Solaris 10 is dated 2005 and Oracle 
currently plans to support it through January 2027 
<https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/new-end-date-of-extended-support-for-oracle-solaris-10-and-113>.

A simple fix would be for Automake to require Perl 5.10; this'd mean I'd 
have to build Perl to test Automake on Solaris 10.

> Also, I'm assuming this failure was running from the development source
> tree.  Does the release tarball work on Solaris 10?

I was using the release tarball.