Marvin Scholz wrote in: <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-m4/2020-07/msg00009.html>
> I've encountered a crash in m4 that happens due to too old gnulib, as > its implementation of vasnprintf uses %n in a non-constant format string > which is not allowed on macOS since macOS 10.13 and leads to a crash. > > This was fixed in gnulib upstream in c41f233c4c38e84023a16339782ee306f03e7f59 > and 7df04f9b8a0adb1575ca0555775ec10860143cbf but the gnulib in m4 does not > seem to be yet updated to that version. The gnulib submodule has been updated on 2020-07-06, see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=m4.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/branch-1.4 > just updating the submodule and running gnulib-tool to update was not > enough apparently. Dealing with git submodules is, unfortunately, often prone to errors. I suggest you copy the 'gitsub.sh' script [1] into your m4 checkout and run $ ./gitsub.sh pull That should fix things on your side. Bruno [1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=top/gitsub.sh;hb=HEAD