These are just cosmetic and don't seem worth back-patching far.
I put them into 9.0 just because it was trivial to do so.

build tree.  If we actually build the docs in the VPATH tree, those dirs
will get created then; but if they're present and empty, they capture the
vpathsearch searches in "make install", preventing installation of prebuilt
docs that might exist in the source tree.  Per bug #5595 from Dmtiriy Igrishin.
Fix based on idea from Peter Eisentraut.

at end of files.

Added a configure test for "long long" datatypes. So far this is only used in ecpg and replaces the old test that was kind of hackish.

This variable is apparently only for Python internally.  In newer releases
of Python this variable pulls in more and more libraries that users are
less likely to have, leading to potential build failures.

output.  Per bug #5339, Perl 5.11 has changed the format of that output
enough to break the previous coding.

Alex Hunsaker

configure warnings.

compilers, by applying a configure check to see if the compiler will accept
an unreferenced "static inline foo ..." function without warnings.  It is
believed that such warnings are the only reason not to declare inlined
functions in headers, if the compiler understands "inline" at all.

Kurt Harriman

versions < 5.8.  Also, if there's no Perl, emit a warning informing the
user that he won't be able to build from a CVS pull.  This is exactly the
same treatment we give Bison and Perl, and for the same reasons.

Behaves more or less unchanged compared to Python 2, but the new language
variant is called plpython3u.  Documentation describing the naming scheme
is included.

shell construct to hide away the stderr output.  Python 3.1 actually core
dumps on the current invocation (http://bugs.python.org/issue7111), but the
new version also has the more general advantage of saving the error message
in config.log for analysis.

perl_embed_ldflags setting.  On OS X it seems that ExtUtils::Embed is
trying to force a universal binary to be built, but you need to specify
that a lot further upstream if you want Postgres built that way; the only
result of including -arch in perl_embed_ldflags is some warnings at the
plperl.so link step.  Per my complaint and Jan Otto's suggestion.

Update install-sh to that from Autoconf 2.63, plus our Darwin-specific
changes (which I simplified a bit).  install-sh is now able to install
multiple files in one run, so we could simplify our makefiles sometime.

install-sh also now has a -d option to create directories, so we don't need
mkinstalldirs anymore.

Use AC_PROG_MKDIR_P in configure.in, so we can use mkdir -p when available
instead of install-sh -d.  For consistency with the rest of the world,
the corresponding make variable has been renamed from $(mkinstalldirs) to
$(MKDIR_P).

This switches the man page building process to use the DocBook XSL stylesheet
toolchain.  The previous targets for Docbook2X are removed. configure has been
updated to look for the new tools.  The Documentation appendix contains the
new build instructions.  There are also a few isolated tweaks in the
documentation to improve places that came out strangely in the man pages.

the full path and version of the program being rejected.

update documentation accordingly.  This is required in order to have support
for a reentrant scanner.  I'm committing this bit separately in order to have
an easy reference if we later decide to make the minimum something different
(like 2.5.33).

This upgrades the configure infrastructure to the latest Autoconf version.
Some notable news are:
 - The workaround for the broken fseeko() test is gone.
 - Checking for unknown options is now provided by Autoconf itself.
 - Fixes for Mac OS X

used to work as intended, but got broken some time ago (a quoted empty string
is not an empty string), and got broken some more by the changes to generate
ecpg's preproc.y automatically.  Given all the unprotected uses of $(PERL)
elsewhere, it seems best to make use of the $(missing) script rather than
trying to ensure each such use is protected individually.  Also fix various
bits of documentation that omitted to mention Perl as a requirement for
building from a CVS pull.  Per a complaint from Robert Haas.

print foo --> print(foo)
string.join(...) --> ' '.join(...)

These changes are backward compatible.

The actual plpython module appears to need significant updates to support
Python 3.0, though.  This change just relieves interested developers from
having to deal with Autoconf.

page build target.  This covers from-source, Debian, and Fedora
installation variants.

Detect and error out on inability to get proper linkage information required for plperl, usually due to absence of perl ExtUtils::Embed module. Backpatch as far as 8.1.

align strings in the --help output.  Do this through our abstraction layer
to eliminate redundancy and randomness in configure.in.

change build system to use only Bison.  Simplify build rules, make file names
uniform.  Don't build the token table header file where it is not needed.

noncomplying cases to be future-proof.

numbered program.  Per persistent buildfarm failures.

Tom Lane

This is required because the value is substituted into the pltcl_*mod
scripts.

vintage Linux is even more broken than we realized: a link to libreadline
will succeed, and fail only at runtime.  It seems that an AC_TRY_RUN test
is the only reliable way to check whether this is really safe.  Per report
from Tatsuo.

GNU gettext before 0.10.36 does not have that function, and is generally too
incomplete to be usable.

libreadline.  What we will do for compatibility :-(

shared libraries.  We've tried this before and had problems with libreadline
not linking properly on some platforms, but that seems to be a libreadline
bug that may have been fixed by now.  In any case, it's early enough in the
8.4 devel cycle that we can afford to have some transient breakage while
we work out any portability problems.

On Darwin, we try -Wl,-dead_strip_dylibs, which seems to be the equivalent
incantation there.

uses of the long-deprecated float32 in contrib/seg; the definitions themselves
are still there, but no longer used.  fmgr/README updated to match.

I added a CREATE FUNCTION to account for existing seg_center() code in seg.c
too, and some tests for it and the neighbor functions.  At the same time,
remove checks for NULL which are not needed (because the functions are declared
STRICT).

I had to do some adjustments to contrib's btree_gist too.  The choices for
representation there are not ideal for changing the underlying types :-(

Original patch by Zoltan Boszormenyi, with some adjustments by me.

- Change configure.in to use Autoconf 2.61 and update generated files.
- Update build system and documentation to support now directory variables
  offered by Autoconf 2.61.
- Replace usages of PGAC_CHECK_ALIGNOF by AC_CHECK_ALIGNOF, now available
  in Autoconf 2.61.
- Drop our patched version of AC_C_INLINE, as Autoconf now has the change.