configure.ac: The macro 'AC_HELP_STRING' is obsolete

[raveit65]

It's only a warning, not a build failure. We are support distros with older autoconf versions. Please do not blindly remove features without checking requirements for all distros.

[raveit65]

In el8 based distros, eg. rocky 8 we use

[rave@rock8 ~]$ rpm -qa autoconf
autoconf-2.69-29.el8.noarch

So we need the the help string for several years. Please read https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/6647 and their suggestions.

AC_HELP_STRING is now [deprecated](https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf//manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Obsolete-Macros.html#Obsolete-Macros) but can be replaced with [AS_HELP_STRING](https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf//manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Pretty-Help-Strings.html#AS%5fHELP%5fSTRING) - which seems to indicate that this dangerous-looking warning is completely uncalled for.

I guess we should provide a private AS_HELP_STRING macro for users of autoconf <= 2.69 and then do the replace.

[rbuj]

@raveit65 I don't think this change requires AC_PREREQ(2.69), AC_HELP_STRING was tagged as obsolete in 2003:

2003-05-22  Akim Demaille

    * doc/autoconf.texi: Replace AC_HELP_STRING AS_HELP_STRING.
    Add AC_HELP_STRING  to the obsolete macros section.
    Typos.
    Use '@.' for sentences that ended in a capital letter.
    From Art Haas.

https://github.com/autotools-mirror/autoconf/blob/master/ChangeLog.3#L17555

[rbuj]

AC_HELP_STRING was tagged as obsolete on AUTOCONF-2.57a in the commit https://github.com/autotools-mirror/autoconf/commit/5958ce17565d82cf54e5936e6b4e3a16169a1c9e

[raveit65]

After i had to rebase caja for rhel8 because of a non needed glib2 version bump from you during development of caja-1.23.0 i am carefully. Honestly this war a hard and time consuming work to get caja-1.26 working for rhel8 with glib2-2.56.4-158.el8.x86_64.

[rbuj]

https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/commit/8f568265bf65f4c7bdc19738f91b4e98ed826394

[lukefromdc]

AS_HELP_STRING has been around back to 2008 at LEAST, as that's when Autoconf 2.62 came out. Thus no distro that will ever ship MATE 1.26 should get a build failure from this change UNLESS a very long term support distro is updating DE's on 14 year old core libraries http://ftp.vim.org/ftp/gnu/autoconf/ . autoconf-2.62-2.63.xdelta.sig 10-Sep-2008

[lukefromdc]

Note that CentOS 8 uses autoconf-2.69-27.el8.noarch.rpm which is much newer

autoconf-2.69-11.el7.noarch.rpm is available (or was) for still-older CentOS 7 Not sure how closely these track RHEL

[lukefromdc]

https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/External-Software.html indicates AS_HELP_STRING is supported on autoconf 2.69 as mentioned in https://github.com/mate-desktop/marco/pull/729#issuecomment-1194459838

As of now, this commit sets the minimum autoconf version at 2.68, which came out in 2010, 13 years ago. RHEL 8 came out in 2019, nine years later

This change will not reach any distro until marco 1.28 comes out save any rolling release using 1.27, which also would have new versions of everything else, autoconf included.

Note that this change has been made in many other packages at this point. Should we merge this one too, revert all the others, or something else? Will any 13 year old LTS be using MATE 1.28?