Re: testsuite HEAD: old-m4-iface.at: autoconf --force fails

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Kurt,

Thank you for reporting this.

* Kurt Roeckx wrote on Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 09:32:35PM CET:
> 
> When running a make check with a recent version of HEAD
> (2005-11-26, latest downloadable from the website), I get an
> error because it's trying to run autoconf --force, and autoconf
> does not have such an option, atleast not in 2.59.

Huh?

$ /usr/bin/autoconf --force
autoconf: no input file
$ /usr/bin/autoconf --version
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.59
*snip*
$ /usr/bin/autoconf --help
Usage: /usr/bin/autoconf [OPTION] ... [TEMPLATE-FILE]
*snip*
  -f, --force               consider all files obsolete
*snip*

Are you using a wrapper that calls one of 2.13 or 2.59 perchance?

> >From the testsuite.log:

> old-m4-iface.at:135: $AUTOCONF --force
> stderr:
> Usage: autoconf [-h] [--help] [-m dir] [--macrodir=dir]
>        [-l dir] [--localdir=dir] [--version] [template-file]

Weird.  I can get neither one of plain 2.59 nor plain 2.13 to emit this
exact usage message.

> stdout:
> old-m4-iface.at:135: exit code was 1, expected 0
> 15. old-m4-iface.at:89: 15. AC_WITH_LTDL (old-m4-iface.at:89):
> FAILED (old-m4-iface.at:135)
> 
> Line 134-135 says:
> LT_AT_BOOTSTRAP([--ltdl --install], [-I libltdl/m4], [ignore], [ignore],
>         [--force])
> 
> And testsuite.at has:
> # LT_AT_BOOTSTRAP([LIBTOOLIZE-ARGS], [ACLOCAL-ARGS], [AUTOHEADER-ARGS],
> #       [AUTOMAKE-ARGS], [AUTOCONF-ARGS], [CONFIGURE-ARGS], [MAKE-ARGS])
> 
> So it seems it'a asking autoconf to run with --force, which
> doesn't make sense to me.

Well, it may be safe to omit the --force here, but honestly, I haven't
done any testing with CVS Libtool and Autoconf-2.13 yet, so I expect
that to be buggy.  And frankly, I'd rather support Automake-1.4 better
than Autoconf-2.13.  I also believe that nobody except GCC uses it any
more (right?), and they don't use plain Libtool either.

OTOH, I find it important that autoconf wrappers are supported decently.
Which system is this, and which exact version of the wrapper, if any, so
we can test it?

Cheers,
Ralf