Re: bootstrap: cannot find package name in configure.ac

[Bernhard Voelker]

On 1/6/21 10:55 PM, Simon Josefsson via Gnulib discussion list wrote:
> Hi.  I'm setting GNU SASL up for git-version-gen and bootstrap, and
> noticed that bootstrap doesn't handle git-version-gen well.  See:
> 
> jas@latte:~$ cat>configure.ac
> AC_INIT([GNU SASL],
>         m4_esyscmd([build-aux/git-version-gen .tarball-version]),
>         [bug-gsasl@gnu.org],
>         [gsasl])
> jas@latte:~$ ~/src/gnulib/build-aux/bootstrap 
> /home/jas/src/gnulib/build-aux/bootstrap: cannot find package name in 
> configure.ac
> jas@latte:~$ 

The existing 'bootstrap' works if the AC_INIT command is written in
one (well, long) line.
BTW: 'autoupdate' would exactly do that: squash the whole command into
one line.

And instead of adding yet another way to do the same job, shouldn't the
existing code better be fixed?  At least it obviously doesn't do what the
comments above the sed script say (bootstrap:186):

  # Prefer a non-empty tarname (4th argument of AC_INIT if given), else
  # fall back to the package name (1st argument with munging)

FWIW there's a final dot '.' missing in that comment.

Have a nice day,
Berny