Autoconf 2.70 is about to be released, and some people have been using
prereleases to build lots of GNU packages. They've run into a problem with GMP,
though, because GMP uses AC_INIT in a way contrary to the Autoconf manual, and
changes in Autoconf mean that GMP's "./.bootstrap" procedure fails as follows:
$ ./.bootstrap
/usr/bin/m4:configure.ac:40: Warning: excess arguments to builtin `m4_define'
ignored
autom4te: error: /usr/bin/m4 failed with exit status: 1
aclocal: error: echo failed with exit status: 1
autoreconf: error: aclocal failed with exit status: 1
The bug occurs in the following line of configure.ac:
AC_INIT(GNU MP, GMP_VERSION, [[email protected], see
https://gmplib.org/manual/Reporting-Bugs.html], gmp)
The Autoconf manual has long said that the 3rd argument of AC_INIT must be an
email address. Unfortunately commas are not valid in RFC 5322 email addresses,
and in Autoconf 2.69d the comma causes problems because a submacro interprets it
as an argument separator. If you'd like to reproduce the bug, you can get
Autoconf 2.69d as described here:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2020-11/msg00003.html
To fix the problem, I suggest using just [[email protected]] as the 3rd
argument of AC_INIT, as being the simplest; or if you want the commentary, put
it in as valid RFC 5322 commentary, e.g., by parenthesizing it:
diff -r 18875a0a3f89 configure.ac
--- a/configure.ac Tue Nov 10 18:17:13 2020 +0100
+++ b/configure.ac Wed Nov 11 22:25:59 2020 -0800
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
AC_REVISION($Revision$)
AC_PREREQ(2.59)
-AC_INIT(GNU MP, GMP_VERSION, [[email protected], see
https://gmplib.org/manual/Reporting-Bugs.html], gmp)
+AC_INIT(GNU MP, GMP_VERSION, [[email protected] (see
https://gmplib.org/manual/Reporting-Bugs.html)], gmp)
AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR(gmp-impl.h)
m4_pattern_forbid([^[ \t]*GMP_])
m4_pattern_allow(GMP_LDFLAGS)
This should be portable to both older and newer Autoconf releases.
If you use Autoconf 2.69d you'll see that it also warns about a lot of obsolete
stuff in gmp's configure.ac etc, but none of these warnings stop the build and
they can be dealt with later.
_______________________________________________
gmp-bugs mailing list
[email protected]
https://gmplib.org/mailman/listinfo/gmp-bugs
