build broken after adding ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4

[Peter Johansson]

Hello,

After modifying my configure.ac and Makefile.am in my project a simple 
`make' did not work, but I had to run autoreconf in order to get it 
working again. Would it be possible to modify the rules generated by 
Automake to avoid this to happen?

My slimmed down project looks like this:

configure.ac:
AC_INIT([foo],[1.0])
AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([foo.c])
AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([autotools])
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
AC_PROG_CPP
AC_PROG_CC
m4_include([m4/find_apr.m4])
APR_FIND_APR(,,1,[1 0])
AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile])
AC_OUTPUT

Makefile.am:
bin_PROGRAMS = foo

If I issue `make' so everything is up to date and then modify the files as:

AC_INIT([foo],[1.0])
AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([foo.c])
AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([autotools])
+AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
AC_PROG_CPP
AC_PROG_CC
-m4_include([m4/find_apr.m4])
APR_FIND_APR(,,1,[1 0])
AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile])
AC_OUTPUT

Makefile.am:
+ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4 --install
bin_PROGRAMS = foo

If I now call `make', I'll get:

cd . && /bin/sh /home/peter/projects/foo/autotools/missing --run 
aclocal-1.10
cd . && /bin/sh /home/peter/projects/foo/autotools/missing --run 
automake-1.10 --gnu
cd . && /bin/sh /home/peter/projects/foo/autotools/missing --run autoconf
/bin/sh ./config.status --recheck
running CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/sh /bin/sh ./configure   --no-create 
--no-recursion
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /bin/mkdir -p
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking for style of include used by make... GNU
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of executables...
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed
checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking for gcc... (cached) gcc
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... (cached) yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... (cached) yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... (cached) none needed
checking dependency style of gcc... (cached) gcc3
./configure: line 4277: syntax error near unexpected token `,,1,1'
./configure: line 4277: `APR_FIND_APR(,,1,1 0)'

The problem seems to be that aclocal is run without flags `-I m4 
--install'. I guess these flags are not picked up until automake is run 
at next step.

It would be great if Automake could take care of this case, because it 
is always a bit annoying to be forced to email co-developers saying: 
"you need to run autoreconf".

I use Automake 1.10 and Autoconf 2.61.

Thanks,
Peter

--
Peter Johansson

svndigest maintainer, http://dev.thep.lu.se/svndigest
yat maintainer,       http://dev.thep.lu.se/yat