On 17/08/2021, Brad House via Bug reports for Automake <bug-automake@gnu.org> wrote: > This ended up being the fix to needing to run autoreconf -fi multiple > times: > https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/commit/e73fb47
Probably an OK workaround. I suspect the effect of this change is to get aclocal to pull in the ax_require_defined.m4 file on the first pass which avoids the "too many loops" problem but not the include order problem (which may not actually matter). > After that, there is also the issue that the newer ax_code_coverage.m4 > that is automatically pulled in is not API compatible as it removes > @CODE_COVERAGE_RULES@ which isn't too friendly, plus adds a slew of > additional .m4 dependencies that had to be imported. You can avoid things being automatically imported by not enabling aclocal --install mode by default (remove this setting from ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS in your Makefile.am files). The default behaviour is to use the files distributed with your package in preference to newer versions that happen to be installed on user's systems. I expect this also would avoid the "too many loops" problem. > And then finally, there is actually a bug in the latest > ax_code_coverage.m4 that quotes AC_MSG_ERROR() which causes older > autoconf/automake versions to barf. > https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/commit/3883d99b05a845e4b40fc25c43ca83db70f4f20f#diff-fe38622a6c742be1bb93e6e65a0728f659114b3dc8d88172cb8844fa963418f9 The original quotation looks reasonable, so this change seems questionable to me. Probably there are real quotation bugs somewhere else. > I'm not sure where to report the last 2 issues. For issues with the autoconf-archive macros, they have their own mailing lists: https://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=autoconf-archive Cheers, Nick