autoconf hangs due to autom4te.cache and NFS problem on AIX

[Chris Pickett]

Hi,

[[Please reply-all, I'm not subscribed.]]

I just found a solution to a problem, and it took me a while to do so 
when Googling so I thought I would try and change for others that may 
encounter it by posting here.

Autoconf 2.61 started hanging recently for me on AIX 5.2.  I don't 
really know what changed in the system, it could just be that some 
clocks are slightly off... who knows what's going on.

Anyway, I decided when fixing to upgrade to the latest versions of the 
autotools, and automake's configure hung when checking whether autoconf 
works.  It was stuck doing this:

/bin/perl -w /path/to/bin/autom4te --language=autoconf 
--output=/dev/null conftest.ac

I don't really know what happened, it just hung, wouldn't respond to 
Ctrl-C, and I had to kill it.

I noticed that I couldn't delete my autom4te.cache directory:

conftest $ ll autom4te.cache/
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 pickett xxx 0 Feb 23 00:27 .nfsCC131

because of that .nfs file.  I don't really know how nfs works 
internally, but if I delete that file manually it just comes back.

The solution is documented in the autom4te manual:

   As an example, to disable Autoconf caches (`autom4te.cache')
globally, include the following lines in `~/.autom4te.cfg':


## ------------------ ##
## User Preferences.  ##
## ------------------ ##

begin-language: "Autoconf-without-aclocal-m4"
args: --no-cache
end-language: "Autoconf-without-aclocal-m4"

By the way, I had similar problems with not being able to delete files 
with Subversion, as you can see here:

http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2160

so I don't really think it's Autoconf's "fault", but if you could find a 
way to make it fail gracefully that would be neat, I suppose.  (I'll 
test a tarball if you like.)  That's not the point of this message 
though, as stated...

Cheers,
Chris