[bug #52779] autoreconf generates broken configure

[Yavor Doganov]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?52779>

                 Summary: autoreconf generates broken configure
                 Project: GNUstep
            Submitted by: yavor
            Submitted on: Mon 01 Jan 2018 10:04:22 PM EET
                Category: Gui/AppKit
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Bug
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

To reproduce, run

$ autoreconf
$ ./configure

Observe the error messages; all of them are due to the completely broken
configure script.  (Naturally, compilation also fails.)  This happens because
autoreconf invokes aclocal, which in turn detects that pkg.m4 from ACDIR
(/usr/share/aclocal in my case) is newer than config/pkg.m4, so it creates
aclocal.m4, copying the macro definition from /usr/share/aclocal.m4.  Autoconf
then makes a mess since config/pkg.m4 is included via the m4 builtin macro and
on top of that is underquoted.

Attached is a non-intrusive patch which simply updates config/pkg.m4.  A
better approach which would be to use the standard/recommended way of dealing
with additional macros:

AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([config])

That way, when you regenerate configure with `autoreconf -i', the macros under
config/ will be updated if a newer version of the .m4 file is available by the
package that is providing it (pkg-config for pkg.m4 and autoconf-archive for
icu.m4).

I suspect that the current approach was preferred in order to avoid aclocal
(as it is part of GNU Automake).  I think it is reasonable to expect that any
user or developer who has to modify configure.ac has automake installed. 
Also, autoreconf is the recommended way of (re)generating the GNU build system
and most users are accustomed to it.



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File Attachments:


-------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon 01 Jan 2018 10:04:22 PM EET  Name:
0001-Update-pkg.m4-to-serial-11.patch  Size: 13KiB   By: yavor

<http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/download.php?file_id=42783>

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