RE: variables containing newline characters

[James Willenbring]

Ralf,

Thank you for your reply.  I put a gzipped tar file containing configure.ac
and Makefile.am at this link:

http://studentweb.stcloudstate.edu/wija0304/Trilinos/autotoolsHelp.gz

The configure.ac is from one of the Trilinos packages, as the top level
Trilinos configure.ac file is mostly a there to direct the process to each
package at the appropriate time and doesn't really recognize any configure
arguments.  The Makefile.am is from the top level of the package that
configure.ac was taken from.  I also included the config directory which
contains a number of m4 macros that we use.

"If the failure comes from a substituted value with newlines, then I wonder
how that could have worked before:  Autoconf before 2.60 wasn't able to
deal with newlines in substituted values."

That is surprising because we have used Autoconf 2.59 for years and have
never had trouble with newlines in substituted values.  Here is an example
of the arguments we might pass to configure:

../configure \
CXXFLAGS=-O3 \
CFLAGS=-O3 \
FFLAGS=-O3 \
--cache-file=config.cache \
--disable-default-packages \
--with-libs="-L/common/TrilinosTestHarness/Trilinos3PL/prebuilt/taucs-2.2
-ltaucs_linux_lam \
-L/common/TrilinosTestHarness/Trilinos3PL/prebuilt/umfpack-4.4
-lumfpack_linux_lam \
-L/common/TrilinosTestHarness/Trilinos3PL/prebuilt/umfpack-4.4/
-lamd_linux_lam \
-L/common/TrilinosTestHarness/Trilinos3PL/prebuilt/superlu-3.0.july05
-lsuperlu_linux_lam \
-lexpat -llapack -lcblas -lf77blas -latlas -lgfortran" \
--with-incdirs="-I/common/TrilinosTestHarness/Trilinos3PL/prebuilt/umfpack-4
.4/ \
-I/common/TrilinosTestHarness/Trilinos3PL/prebuilt/superlu-3.0.july05 \
-I/common/TrilinosTestHarness/Trilinos3PL/prebuilt/taucs-2.2" \
--with-gnumake

(Note that the lines that run over the end of a line without a new character
are one line in my file, but are too long for a line in my email editor.)

Thanks again for your response.

Jim


-----Original Message-----
From: Ralf Wildenhues [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 3:57 PM
To: James Willenbring
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: variables containing newline characters

Hello James,

* James Willenbring wrote on Fri, May 04, 2007 at 05:51:18AM CEST:
>
> I am attempting to move the Trilinos project from Automake 1.8.2 to
1.10.  I
> am having trouble with variables that span multiple lines.  Since some
of
> the variables that we commonly use can have hundreds of characters, it
is
> common to use newline characters to break them up.
>
> That has always worked for us in the past.  Now I get a warning during
configure:
>
> configure: WARNING: Cache variable ac_cv_env_LIBS_value contains a
newline.

But this is only a warning (and a legitimate one at that, because the
newlines are not correctly preserved in the config.cache file if used).

> Then make fails quickly:
>
> Makefile:161: *** missing separator.  Stop.

If the failure comes from a substituted value with newlines, then I wonder
how that could have worked before:  Autoconf before 2.60 wasn't able to
deal with newlines in substituted values.

> Is there a solution for this problem, other than passing long lines to
configure?

Please post a pointer to the project sources, or, alternatively, its
configure.ac and the toplevel Makefile.am file.  Thanks.

Cheers,
Ralf