On 08/15/2010 06:59 PM, David Fang wrote:
The ECHO that is chosen by autoconf on darwin8 (printf %s\n) is buggy:
fangism % printf %s\n foo
foonfangism% printf '%s\n' foo
foo
Must be due to the version of the Bourne shell (2.05b).
Failure is similar with sh-3.2.
The 'correct' value of ECHO should be printf '%s\n' (note the extra
single quote protection).
I don't know yet whether that is forward-compatible with newer versions
of Bourne shell.
Don't recall which version of autoconf broke this, betweem 2.63 and
latest.
The problem seems to be in the way that "printf '%s\n'" is assigned to
as_echo.
I've tried to hack config.status with quote-protections and escapes:
ECHO='printf "%s\n"'
ECHO='printf %s\\n'
(and tried hacking the generated 'configure')
But the substitution process (uses some creative sed magic) during
AC_OUTPUT keeps destroying the result.
Yes, the problem is in how $ECHO is then "unquoted" by the shell. We should
really use a shell function for echo (and printf for echo -n) instead.
My autotoolized projects all use $(ECHO) in Makefile{.am} inside the
target scripts. Everything that would normally use 'echo' is dying
horribly, especially constructs like: var=`$(ECHO) ...`.
Can you suggest a temporary work-around until that is fixed?
either at configure-time or post-configure-time?
I'm desperate enough to use sed to patch config.status after it's been
generated:
ECHO='printf %s\n'
with
ECHO='echo'
to get the old behavior.
Fang
David Fang
http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~fang/
http://www.achronix.com/
