I find myself trying to build newer versions of GNU toolchain components on a 
very
old system, namely OpenServer 5.0.7.  I know that supporting old systems like 
this
is difficult, so I do recognize a need to do the heavy lifting on my own, 
however,
if anyone could offer some help, it would be great.

I've run into the following error all too frequently, and, to avoid the error, 
so
far, have just backed off to an older release of whatever is being built.  For
example:

  [kevinb@sddemokb:~/gnu.org/m4-1.4.18]$ ./configure -C --prefix=${HOME}
  ./configure[1845]: : is not an identifier

I supposed that perhaps in this case, [1845] might be a line number.  If that 
is the
case, I suppose that this error is happening in an ac_subst_vars='' assignment.
This assignment begins at line 630 and ends at line 1844 of the configure 
script.
Line 1845 contains a different, one-line assignment:  ac_subst_files=''

The ac_subst_vars assignment is large, I wondered about command-length limits
as many years ago I ran into a situation where I found I could only write
command-line awk sources up to a certain size before source needed to be put
into a .awk file where command-line length limits were not a factor.

To that end:

$ getconf ARG_MAX
102400

But, I note that the assignment is only about 1215 lines (19238 bytes) long, so 
it
hardly seems this should be the problem.

There does not appear to be a colon character anywhere nearby, so the error 
message
presents somewhat of a conundrum.

Does anyone have a thought about how to begin to work through coming up with a 
work
around for this sort of situation?

Apologies if this is not the most appropriate forum to ask this.  I'll gladly 
take
suggestions on how to better investigate the issue or provide helpful 
information.

-- 
Kevin R. Bulgrien, Network/Software Engineer
Computer Systems Design, Inc dba Systems Design

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