On 13/10/2020, Ross Burton <r...@burtonini.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Using autoconf 2.69c (upgrading from 2.69b meant we could drop two
> patches, so that's good news!) to build gmp fails in a rather
> mysterious way:
[...]
> | m4:configure.ac:40: Warning: excess arguments to builtin `m4_define'
> ignored
> | autom4te: error: m4 failed with exit status: 1
> | aclocal: error: echo failed with exit status: 1
> | autoreconf: error: aclocal failed with exit status: 1
>
> Line 40 is:
>
> AC_INIT(GNU MP, GMP_VERSION, [gmp-b...@gmplib.org, see
> https://gmplib.org/manual/Reporting-Bugs.html], gmp)
>
> Has anyone seen this, or similar, before?
This appears to be caused by a quoting bug in _AC_INIT_PACKAGE (expanded
by AC_INIT) which was recently introduced by commit 6a0c0239449a ("Trim
whitespace from arguments of AC_INIT").
It would seem that the comma from the 3rd argument ends up getting
passed unquoted to m4_define which results in this error.
This code in lib/autoconf/general.m4:
m4_ifndef([AC_PACKAGE_BUGREPORT],
[m4_define([AC_PACKAGE_BUGREPORT], _ac_init_BUGREPORT)])
should probably be changed to:
m4_ifndef([AC_PACKAGE_BUGREPORT],
[m4_define([AC_PACKAGE_BUGREPORT], m4_defn([_ac_init_BUGREPORT]))])
Cheers,
Nick
