Workaround for bug in QNX4

[Mark Hessling]

As the title suggests configure scripts generated with autoconf 2.65
fail to execute of QNX4 due to a bug in grep on that platform.
This email is a suggestion for a workaround for that bug.

I use autoconf for several projects that run on QNX4 amoung many other
platforms. I've been using autoconf 2.61 due to another bug in autoconf
2.64 and found that 2.65 has fixed THAT bug, but fails because of the
bug in grep on QNX4.

Reference platform ubuntu 10.4 autoconf 2.65

Details:

Line 2542 of /usr/share/autoconf/autoconf/autoconf.m4f and line 406
of /usr/share/autoconf/autoconf/status.m4 contain the following line:

ac_delim_num=`echo "$ac_subst_vars" | grep -c '$'`

grep -c '$' on QNX4 ALWAYS returns 0; this is the bug with grep on QNX4.
As QNX4 is not fully supported, it is unlikely that this bug will be
fixed, at least not in the short term.

However, grep -c '^' works fine on QNX4 (and other platforms I've
tested).

As the purpose of the above line of code in autoconf appears to be to
count the number of lines of substitute variables, then counting the
number of "start of lines" as opposed to the number of "end of lines"
would result in the same result, and presumably will work on the same
platforms that the current code works on. grep -c '^' works as expected
in a configure script on the reference platform.

Proposed "bug" fix is to replace line 2542
of /usr/share/autoconf/autoconf/autoconf.m4f and line 406
of /usr/share/autoconf/autoconf/status.m4 with the following line:

ac_delim_num=`echo "$ac_subst_vars" | grep -c '^'`

Thanks for your attention, Mark


-- 

* Mark Hessling, address@hidden http://www.rexx.org/ 
* Author of THE, a Free XEDIT/KEDIT editor, Rexx/SQL, Rexx/CURL,  etc. 
* Maintainer of Regina Rexx interpreter and Rexx/Tk 
* Use Rexx? join the Rexx Language Association: http://www.rexxla.org/