RE: Autoreconf stops with "non-POSIX variable name"

[Borchert, Oliver]

Eric and Russ,

thanks for the reply. After long testing back and forth I decided to use 
AC_SUBST. 
My solution might not be the cleanest but it works for me.

In configure.ac I added the following line
AC_SUBST([DOLLAR_SIGN],[$])

In the Makefile.am I changed my previous line into
address@hidden@(shell cat $(SRC_DIR)/$(MY_REVISION_FILE))

Finally the makefile ended up with  the line of code I wanted
MY_REVISION=$(shell cat $(SRC_DIR)/$(MY_REVISION_FILE))

And it works.
Again, thanks for your help

Oliver

> [adding automake]
> 
> On 03/29/2013 03:44 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
> >> MY_REVISION_FILE=my-revision.txt
> >> MY_REVISION=$(shell cat $(top_srcdir)/$(MY_REVISION_FILE))
> 
> $(shell ...) is a GNU make extension, and by using it, you are making your
> Makefile.am useless for all other make flavors.  Automake's goal is to be
> portable to ALL makes by default, hence the warning.
> 
> >
> >> server/Makefile.am:9: cat $(top_srcdir: non-POSIX variable name
> >> server/Makefile.am:9: (probably a GNU make extension)
> >> autoreconf: automake failed with exit status: 1
> 
> Admittedly, the warning is rather poor quality; perhaps it is worth turning 
> this
> into an automake bug to improve the quality of that message.
> 
> >
> > This is actually an Automake question, but the short answer is that
> > you probably have fatal warnings enabled and you need to add
> > -Wno-portability to the Automake flags (in AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE, for
> example).
> 
> Or don't use $(shell), or upgrade to Automake-NG (which _requires_ GNU
> make to be installed on the end-user's machine, and therefore should let
> you use GNU make extensions without question).
>