On Mar 13, 2000, Akim Demaille <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> And again, I shall emphasize that this little comfort is a myth: you
> *need* to update Automake if you update Autoconf, let it be because
> Automake still doesn't support AC_CONFIG_FILES, AC_CONFIG_HEADERS and
> the like, new AC_SUBST variables etc.
But I'm not talking about updating autoconf, that's the whole point.
I just wanted to update automake, and, because of a minor patch that
fixed one minor inconvenience (an autoconf warning), I wasted a whole
hour investigating a problem that seemed to be totally unrelated.
Whenever automake decides it's time to adopt the new autoconf's
features, I won't be able to update automake without updating autoconf
too. Before that, I'd rather not fall into this trap again.
> I don't understand what you mean. This issue has be commented several
> times, and in addition the guilty message is given explicitly in the
> warning.
I was using autoconf 2.13, and automake's missing.m4 contained:
AC_MSG_WARN([`missing'...])
Note, the backtick was not quoted. The quote had been removed to
silence CVS autoconf.
The result was shell-script with an unmatched backtick, that matched
another backtick a few lines below, that should have matched another
in the same line, that matched on some lines below, and so on, and so
on, until the parser found something outside backticks that had to be
inside them, and flagged an error. It was not beautiful. It costed
me hours, and I knew of the problem, new of the incompatibilities
between versions of autoconf, etc. Nevertheless, I took me a very
long time to figure it out.
Now think of a random user that decides to upgrade automake because it
will let him have object files in sub-directories, and that is nowhere
advised that he must also upgrade autoconf, otherwise he'll get weird
error messages from [s]hell! :-)
--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Enjoy Guaranį
Cygnus Solutions, a Red Hat company aoliva@{redhat, cygnus}.com
Free Software Developer and Evangelist CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp
oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} Write to mailing lists, not to me
