Re: AC_LBL_FIXINCLUDES does not make it into configure

[Guy Harris via tcpdump-workers <tcpdump-workers () lists tcpdump org>]

> --- Begin Message ---
>
>
> From: Guy Harris <gharris () sonic net>
>
> Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2023 00:50:02 -0800
>
> On Jan 27, 2023, at 4:53 AM, Denis Ovsienko <denis () ovsienko info> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 27 Jan 2023 01:40:48 -0800
> > Guy Harris <gharris () sonic net> wrote:
> >
> > > *don't* support C99 inline?  If not, we could just remove the call
> > > from configure.ac and the definition from aclocal.m4.
> >
> > In 2002 in commit b1263c6 you wrote it was some HP C compiler that
> > Autoconf 2.13 could not drive.  I have never seen HP-UX in the wild, but
> > assuming the amount of improvement made in Autoconf during the
> > subsequent 10 years (Autoconf 2.69 is from 2012) and the amount of
> > improvement made in HP-UX (which had the most recent release in 2022),
> > to me it would make the most sense to say the problem AC_LBL_C_INLINE
> > solved (HP C specifics) no longer exists unless proven otherwise, and
> > AC_LBL_C_INLINE should be removed with a good change log entry.
>
> That commit was
>
> commit b1263c69c58e58e326997ec8b2db81d6e3666bc6
> Author: Guy Harris <gharris () sonic net>
> Date:   Fri Jun 28 10:45:40 2002 +0000
>
>     Some versions of the HP C compiler can handle inlines, but not if they
>     return a structure pointer.  Check whether the C compiler can handle
>     inline functions that return a structure pointer, not whether they can
>     handle inline functions that return an int, as at least some versions of
>     autoconf's AC_C_INLINE do.
>
> I presume that, given the increased use of, and thus demand for, inline as a keyword in C, HP eventually fixed the 
> problem (I *think* the problem was that the compiler rejected code that inlined structure-pointer-returning functions, 
> rather than generating bad code for it).  (If not, maybe the autoconf developers added a check for that.)
>
> If anybody still has such a problem, they have my sympathy, just as people stuck with, say, compilers that don't 
> support function prototypes do, but I'm not sure they should have support for building tcpdump (or libpcap or tcpslice) 
> on their machine with their current compiler.
>
> As far as I'm concerned, replacing it with AC_C_INLINE, as you did, is the right thing to do, at least for now.  We 
> could consider removing it in the future, given that we require C99 and C99 has inline as a keyword.
>
> --- End Message ---
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