Re: autoconf weirdness

[Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu>]

Brian May <bam@debian.org> writes:

> On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 10:24:02AM -0400, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> > It almost looks like you invoked an Autoconf macro that swallowed
> > a lot of input text.  What is in your configure.in (or
> > configure.ac)?
> 
> I am just using the configure.in from the Debian package.
> 
> I made a small change to Makefile.am, and I want that
> change to appear in Makefile.in.
> 
> However, just typing in "automake" results in a Makefile
> that is not useable, presumably because the autoconf version
> is too old or something.

I've now taken a look at this.  It seems to me that there must be
a quoting problem somewhere in the included m4 files.  There is a
horrible, horrible number of those, though, and I don't want to
spend a lot of time looking through them.

> > Are you using Autoconf 2.13 or 2.53?
> 
> I just typed in
> 
> aclocal -I m4
> autoconf
> 
> It seems to have used version 2.53 (see header at top), but I don't know
> why...
> 
> It has at the top:
> 
> AC_PREREQ(2.13)               dnl Minimum Autoconf version required.
> 
> How do I force version 2.13 to be used?

You don't want to do that:

    blp@pfaff:~/tmp/shellutils-2.0.11(0)$ grep AC_PREREQ *
    aclocal.m4:[AC_PREREQ([2.12])
    aclocal.m4:  AC_PREREQ(2.14a)
    aclocal.m4:  AC_REQUIRE([jm_AC_PREREQ_XSTRTOUMAX])
    aclocal.m4:AC_PREREQ(2.13)
    aclocal.m4:AC_DEFUN(jm_AC_PREREQ_XSTRTOUMAX,
    aclocal.m4:AC_PREREQ(2.13)
    aclocal.m4:AC_PREREQ(2.14a)
    aclocal.m4:AC_PREREQ(2.13)               dnl Minimum Autoconf version required.
    aclocal.m4:AC_PREREQ(2.13)               dnl Minimum Autoconf version required.
    grep: autom4te.cache: Is a directory
    configure.in:AC_PREREQ(2.13)               dnl Minimum Autoconf version required.
    grep: debian: Is a directory
    grep: doc: Is a directory
    grep: intl: Is a directory
    grep: lib: Is a directory
    grep: m4: Is a directory
    grep: man: Is a directory
    grep: po: Is a directory
    grep: src: Is a directory
    grep: tests: Is a directory

In other words, at least version 2.14 is needed, so 2.13 won't
work.
-- 
"There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you.
 And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you.
 I told them you were the best.  Now you damn well better be."
--Orson Scott Card, _Ender's Game_