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Re: 2.49e problems with gcc


From: Akim Demaille
Subject: Re: 2.49e problems with gcc
Date: 10 May 2001 19:32:46 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) XEmacs/21.1 (Cuyahoga Valley)

>>>>> "Tim" == Tim Van Holder <address@hidden> writes:

Tim> As for Akim's statement: changequote is clearly to blame here; is
Tim> there no way for autoconf to detect such problems before invoking
Tim> m4?

Again, I think it is just miscommunication.  I really understood
`changequote is broken' (which is likely since we do redefine it),
while it should read `people were used to change arbitrarily the
quotes, i.e., change deeply the environment and were expecting the
macros invoked in between to be robust to this'.

So, yes, that a problem related to quotes, but not changequote in my
sense.

But in the case you presented, really, I see _nothing_ dangerous with
changequote.

changequote(, )dnl
  ac_tr_decl=HAVE_DECL_`echo $ac_func | tr 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'`
changequote([, ])dnl

and actually these changequote are *totally* useless.  There is only
m4-dead code in between, we don't care at all what the quotes are in
there.


Personally, if Autoconf were to be designed today, I would ban
changequote.  changequote must be used to _set_ the quotes at the
beginning the autoconf.m4, period.

The best answer to your question, I guess, would be a warning
`changequote is hell, avoid it'.


Tim> And as for the autoheader problem: is it supposed to fail
Tim> silently (as it does for me), 

No, it should not.

Tim> or is it supposed to tell me what went wrong (running the
Tim> traces.sh it leaves behind _does_ give me output telling me where
Tim> to look for problems; running autoheader gives no output).

`What went wrong' is, IMHO, overkill, but it should report that m4
failed, and leave m4's stderr visible (if possible, which might not be
the case since currently we use stderr to get the traces).



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