Re: Is AX_PATH_GENERIC() broken?

[Francesco Salvestrini]

Hi Vadim,

On Wednesday 23 June 2010, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
>  Hello,
> 
>  It looks like AX_PATH_GENERIC is broken:
> 
>       % cat configure.ac
>       AC_INIT([foo],[1.0])
>       AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
>       AX_PATH_GENERIC([curl])
>       AC_SUBST(FOO)
>       % curl -s -o ax_path_generic.m4
>  'http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=autoconf-archive.git;a=blob_plain;f
> =m4/ax_path_generic.m4' % aclocal -I .
>       % autoconf
>       configure.ac:4: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_SUBST
>             If this token and others are legitimate, please use
>  m4_pattern_allow. See the Autoconf documentation.
>       configure:2373: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_MSG_RESULT
> 
> IOW, any macros used after AX_PATH_GENERIC() don't work, probably because
> there is a mismatched bracket or something like this in it but I don't see
> anything obviously wrong and don't really know how to debug it.
> 
>  Unsurprisingly, any macros using AX_PATH_GENERIC(), e.g. AX_LIB_CURL(),
> are broken too and using them results in the same error message.

There's no mismatched-bracket problem at the first glance (there could be a 
handful of bugs anyway ...).

By looking into the produced 'configure' script you should find that 
AX_PATH_GENERIC has been partially expanded. You just copied the 
AX_PATH_GENERIC macro without its dependencies (AX_COMPARE_VERSION).

By copying ax_compare_version.m4 too you should be able to fix your problem. 
Point your -I flag to the whole m4 autoconf-archive to avoid such kind of 
problems.

>  It would be great if somebody could look into this because
> AX_PATH_GENERIC() definitely looks like a useful macro (although it's
> unfortunate that it doesn't provide --without-library option to disable the
> use of the library entirely, it would have been perfect if it did) but it
> just can't be used currently.

That could be an enhancement for the next revision, AC_ARG_WITH comes handy at 
the moment. 
 
>  Thanks in advance,
> VZ

Thank you for your feedback. Sorry for this delayed reply.

Ciao,
Francesco


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