autoconf 2.69 erroneously includes "runstatedir" feature

[Stephanos Ioannidis]

The Debian/Ubuntu autoconf 2.69 package currently supports the "runstatedir" feature, which is supposed to be available from the autoconf 2.70 and above.

This is because the autoconf 2.69-9 package release pulled in an upstream patch that added the support for "runstatedir" feature and this is not a correct thing to do -- for obvious reasons, different package versions of the same upstream release should not contain different features.

This alters the behaviour of what is supposed to be autoconf 2.69, making it behave like autoconf 2.70 -- the `configure` script generated by this "autoconf 2.69" looks like that generated by autoconf 2.70 (i.e. it contains "runstatedir"-related code).

This is problematic because many projects (e.g. binutils, gcc, ...) specify an exact version of autoconf to be used for generating the config files in order to ensure that the generated config files are without any version-dependent differences -- and it is extremely confusing and misleading when your "supposedly autoconf 2.69" generates what looks to have been generated by autoconf 2.70.

The "runstatedir" patch that was pulled in as part of the autoconf 2.69-9 package release must be reverted for this reason.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: autoconf 2.69-11.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.8.0-55.62~20.04.1-generic 5.8.18
Uname: Linux 5.8.0-55-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.18
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
Date: Tue Jul 6 00:49:44 2021
InstallationDate: Installed on 2021-05-18 (47 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Release amd64 (20200731)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: autoconf
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)