Re: [swarm-hackers] "Swarm Wiki Guide - Installing Swarm on Mac OS X from Source" problems

[Scott Christley]

I imagine that once libtool became more stable it wasn't necessary to have this file, and it was forgotten that a special sed check was in the file.

It is unclear from looking at the file revisions, exactly which code is for sed, but I assume it is this chunk:

############################################################
# NOTE: This macro has been submitted for inclusion into   #
#  GNU Autoconf as AC_PROG_SED.  When it is available in   #
#  a released version of Autoconf we should remove this    #
#  macro and use it instead.                               #
############################################################
# LT_AC_PROG_SED
# --------------
# Check for a fully-functional sed program, that truncates
# as few characters as possible.  Prefer GNU sed if found.
AC_DEFUN([LT_AC_PROG_SED],
[AC_MSG_CHECKING([for a sed that does not truncate output])
AC_CACHE_VAL(lt_cv_path_SED,
[# Loop through the user's path and test for sed and gsed.
# Then use that list of sed's as ones to test for truncation.
as_save_IFS=$IFS; IFS=$PATH_SEPARATOR
for as_dir in $PATH
do
  IFS=$as_save_IFS
  test -z "$as_dir" && as_dir=.
  for lt_ac_prog in sed gsed; do
    for ac_exec_ext in '' $ac_executable_extensions; do
      if $as_executable_p "$as_dir/$lt_ac_prog$ac_exec_ext"; then
        lt_ac_sed_list="$lt_ac_sed_list $as_dir/$lt_ac_prog$ac_exec_ext"
      fi
    done
  done
done
lt_ac_max=0
lt_ac_count=0
# Add /usr/xpg4/bin/sed as it is typically found on Solaris
# along with /bin/sed that truncates output.
for lt_ac_sed in $lt_ac_sed_list /usr/xpg4/bin/sed; do
  test ! -f $lt_ac_sed && break
  cat /dev/null > conftest.in
  lt_ac_count=0
  echo $ECHO_N "0123456789$ECHO_C" >conftest.in
  # Check for GNU sed and select it if it is found.
  if "$lt_ac_sed" --version 2>&1 < /dev/null | grep 'GNU' > /dev/null; then
    lt_cv_path_SED=$lt_ac_sed
    break
  fi
  while true; do
    cat conftest.in conftest.in >conftest.tmp
    mv conftest.tmp conftest.in
    cp conftest.in conftest.nl
    echo >>conftest.nl
    $lt_ac_sed -e 's/a$//' < conftest.nl >conftest.out || break
    cmp -s conftest.out conftest.nl || break
    # 10000 chars as input seems more than enough
    test $lt_ac_count -gt 10 && break
    lt_ac_count=`expr $lt_ac_count + 1`
    if test $lt_ac_count -gt $lt_ac_max; then
      lt_ac_max=$lt_ac_count
      lt_cv_path_SED=$lt_ac_sed
    fi
  done
done
SED=$lt_cv_path_SED
])
AC_MSG_RESULT([$SED])
])

So what I did was create a file acsed.m4 which contains this code, then changed configure.in to use the LT_AC_PROG_SED macro instead of the AC_PROG_SED macro.  But it does *not* fail on the Mac system sed; it passes with flying colors.  So either this isn't the correct code, or it is not checking a capability of sed that is needed.

From what I can gather, the configure sed check only checks that sed can handle large input, it doesn't check for any other special features.

Nima, from your analysis of Alex's problem with sed, can you tell use what sed was trying to do?  What command was it actually doing that failed?

Scott

On Nov 21, 2009, at 1:23 AM, Bill Northcott wrote:

To be explicit:

From the Changelog in the m4 directory

2003-08-11  Bill Northcott  <address@hidden>

* aclibtool.m4: added libtool macros to configure sed.

It seems that at some point since then someone in their infinite wisdom decided to throw it away!

Bill
On 21/11/2009, at 7:16 PM, Nima Talebi wrote:

Okay, for now I put in a check in the OS X makefiles, and documented the requirement for GNU sed here.

I've also added an entry about all this to ChangeLog under the OSX section of the code.

On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 6:43 PM, Scott Christley <address@hidden> wrote:

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