How to pinpoint aclocal failure

[Yang Tse]

Hello!

Since I'm not sure if this is actually an automake or autoconf issue,
and sure you can also help I'm also posting this here as well as on
the autoconf mailin-list. Excuse me if this bothers someone.

Last addition of some macros to the cURL (libcurl) project have
triggered an aclocal failure which is only happening on the continuous
build system on Solaris systems. On other platforms there is no
problem related with this. http://curl.haxx.se/auto/

The failing system log can be viewed here
http://curl.haxx.se/auto/log.cgi?id=20080730141739-25648 For debugging
purposes aclocal is being run with --verbose on SunOS systems, but it
fails equally silently.

The reported error is:

/opt/csw/bin/gm4: memory exhausted
autom4te: /opt/csw/bin/gm4 failed with exit status: 1
aclocal: autom4te failed with exit status: 1
The aclocal command line failed

Versions being used are:

autoconf version 2.61
autom4te version 2.61
automake version 1.10.1
aclocal version 1.10.1
libtool version 1.5.24
GNU m4 version 1.4.5

If instead of using GNU m4 version 1.4.5 on the Solaris box we use GNU
m4 version 1.4.11 the failure is not triggerred. Part of the problem
is that we have to make it work with gm4 1.4.5 on this system.

What would you suggest to further pinpoint if there is a recursion
problem with our macros, or if aclocal is looping to much, or if the
shell is trashing autom4te's output in its way to gm4 or if it is
actually a gm4 binary or version problem ?

Could some additional tracing be enabled even if we need to edit whatever ?

Thanks
-- 
-=[Yang]=-