[Cin] configure.ac update

[mnieuw at zap.a2000.nl]

On Sat, 26 Mar 2022 21:55:16 +0300
Andrew Randrianasulu <randrianasulu at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Saturday, March 26, 2022, mnieuw--- via Cin
> <cin at lists.cinelerra-gg.org> wrote:
> 
> > When building on Manjaro, it complained that configure.ac was out of
> > date, and I should run autoupdate, which I did, and all was fine.
> > I checked then that updated configure.ac on Mint 19.2 (oldest
> > distro I have active) and it is fine there too.  
> 
> 
> 
> to be honest I am not sure if updated configure.ac will work on
> system with older autotools? it seems mostly cosmetic issue user can
> fix manually, and it even works as-is (at least on termux, and it
> tend to be rolling distro...)

I think this was long overdue, those old macros were obsolete, see
https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/autoconf-2.57/html_node/autoconf_154.html

They wrote that by for autoconf 2 up from autoconf 1.xx these changes
were introduced, and in 2003 autoconf 2.57 was released. So these
new versions of the macros could be the recommended
ones for over 20 years. That is even well before Cinelerra started
using autotools. Adam's original (HV) version did not.

Plus, it did not work on Manjaro without update. 

It works (updated) on Mint 19.2, I just saw I have a Mint 19.1
32 bit still on a VM. Will test.

MatN
P.S. I tried to work with cmake to port the original linuxdeploy to
aarch64. Way too complicated, maybe it has its points for automated
building/testing (Travis CI). 
In contrast, the autotools were a relief, and I had not created a
project with them before. I agree very much with the
comment about it on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Autotools, Responses to Criticism ,
original at
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2021-01/msg00013.html
(January 2021, thus quite recent). I agree that the docs, while
complete, are a reference, not learning material.