Re: AC_PACKAGE_VERSION visibility slightly changed in autoconf-2.69c. Bug or feature?

[Nick Bowler]

On 2020-10-22, Nick Bowler <nbowler@draconx.ca> wrote:
> On 22/10/2020, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 11:53 AM Nick Bowler <nbowler@draconx.ca> wrote:
>>> On 2020-10-22, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com> wrote:
>>> > On Wed, Oct 21, 2020 at 10:25 PM Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
>>> > wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> On 10/21/20 6:15 AM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>>> >> > We*could*  add a special case in AC_INIT where, if any of the
>>> >> > third,
>>> >> > fourth, or fifth arguments contain the literal strings
>>> >> > `AC_PACKAGE_NAME` or `AC_PACKAGE_VERSION`, those are replaced with
>>> >> > the
>>> >> > values of the first and second argument, respectively.  This would
>>> >> > keep the GHC code working as-is.  I'm not sure whether that's a
>>> >> > good
>>> >> > idea; cc:ing Paul and Eric for their thoughts.
>>> >>
>>> >> I'm not following all the details here
>>> >
>>> > The concrete problem is that, without the hack I described, we cannot
>>> > support both
>>> >
>>> > AC_INIT([foo], [1.0], [foo-bug@foo.org], [foo-AC_PACKAGE_VERSION])
>>> >
>>> > and
>>> >
>>> > AC_INIT([bar], [1.0], [foo-bug@[192.0.2.1]])
>>>
>>> I think this is missing the point.  The m4 way is that such an
>>> email address should simply be double quoted to avoid the unwanted
>>> m4 expansion, for example:
>>>
>>>   AC_INIT([bar], [1.0], [[foo-bug@[192.0.2.1]]])
>>
>> I tried that and it doesn't work.  No amount of extra quotation (ok, I
>> only went up to four levels before I gave up) will prevent the square
>> brackets from being lost, if I don't have autoconf use m4_defn to set
>> the value of the shell variable PACKAGE_BUGREPORT.
>
> It works perfectly fine for me with Autoconf-2.69...
>
>   % cat >configure.ac <<'EOF'
> AC_INIT([bar], [1.0], [[foo-bug@[192.0.2.1]]])
>

Bleh, I did the thing where I modified the script but forgot to revise
the email to include the update before sending...  I added

AS_ECHO(["AC_AUTOCONF_VERSION"])

to this configure script which is displayed on all the transcripts.

> AS_ECHO(["AC_PACKAGE_BUGREPORT"])
> AS_ECHO(["$PACKAGE_BUGREPORT"])
>
> AC_OUTPUT
> EOF
>
>   % autoconf-2.69
>   % ./configure
>   2.69
>   foo-bug@[192.0.2.1]
>   foo-bug@[192.0.2.1]
>   configure: creating ./config.status
>
> And it also works as expected with the zack/ac-init-quoting branch if I
> simply revert the patch hunks identified earlier in this thread:
>
>   % autoconf-zack-patched
>   % ./configure
>   2.69c.10-6487-dirty
>   foo-bug@[192.0.2.1]
>   foo-bug@[192.0.2.1]
>   configure: creating ./config.status
>
> If the hunks are not reverted, quotation problems are readily apparent:
>
>   % autoconf-zack-unpatched

(and obviously I ran configure here...)

>   2.69c.10-6487
>   foo-bug@[192.0.2.1]
>   [foo-bug@[192.0.2.1]]
>   configure: creating ./config.status
>
> (those patch hunks are not the only instances of overquotation added by the
> patch, I see that the patch also overquotes the bugreport address in the
> configure --help text)

Cheers,
  Nick