i believe a recent autoconf update triggered a bug in m4 while processing crappy m4 code. the project in question is "rezound": http://rezound.sf.net/ (version 0.12.3_beta to be exact)
the reduced test case is: $ cat configure.ac AC_INIT ajv_CXX_FLAG(-g) AC_OUTPUT $ cat aclocal.m4 AC_DEFUN(ajv_CXX_FLAG, [AC_MSG_CHECKING(if $CXX accepts $1 )] AC_MSG_RESULT(yes) ) $ autoconf <hang here in m4> the issue seems to be that the 2nd argument to AC_DEFUN is being expanded incorrectly due to the [] not enclosing everything. it only occurs if a macro is also used outside of the [] (so plain shell code doesnt trigger the issue). if the code is changed as below, then it works fine: AC_DEFUN(ajv_CXX_FLAG, [AC_MSG_CHECKING(if $CXX accepts $1 ) AC_MSG_RESULT(yes)] ) looking at the m4 temp file in /tmp/m4-.../m4-10000 shows that AC_MSG_CHECKING seems to be expanded over and over until the process is killed. m4 1.4.1{2,3,4} all behave the same way. testing with autoconf-2.65 here. -mike
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