[Leo Moisio] Bug#432941: autoconf: autoreconf can't handle multi-line assignment to ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS

[Ben Pfaff]

Leo Moisio filed the following bug report against the Debian
packaging of Autoconf 2.61.  I do not think that it is a result
of any of Debian's changes to Autoconf, so I am passing it along
to the Autoconf bugs list.

It would be helpful if the CC to address@hidden
could be retained in any discussion, so that the discussion gets
logged in the Debian bug tracking system as well as the Autoconf
bug list.

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Subject: Bug#432941: autoconf: autoreconf can't handle multi-line assignment to 
ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS
From: Leo Moisio <address@hidden>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <address@hidden>
Message-ID: <address@hidden>
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 12:43:57 +0300

Autoconf manual tells that:

"If you want autoreconf to pass flags that are not listed here on to
aclocal, set ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS in your Makefile.am."

However, if this line is split like so:

ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = \
        -I m4

Then, when running autoreconf -v, this happens:

autoreconf: running: aclocal \

And in this case, the -I m4 indeed is not in effect and the scripts are
not found.

Automake itself correctly handles this case, when make is used to
rebuild aclocal.m4, and so does autoreconf when the line is not split
like this:

ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4

However, I couldn't find it mentioned anywhere that the line couldn't be
split.

The problem seems to be around lines 403-405 of /usr/bin/autoreconf
which does:

          if (/^ACLOCAL_[A-Z_]*FLAGS\s*=\s*(.*)/)
            {
              $aclocal_flags = $1;
              last;
            }

Now I don't know why I would want to split the line, but it's not obvious from
documentation that it can't be split currently, and it's not very coherent with
other lines being splittable in Makefile.am.

Leo Moisio
-------------------- End of forwarded message --------------------

-- 
Ben Pfaff 
http://benpfaff.org