Re: No dummy .dep/*.Po files on AIX

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Mathias,

* Mathias Froehlich wrote on Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 10:20:38AM CEST:
> 
> Past ./configure, the 'dummy' .Po files for that build where all missing 
> including the .deps directories. Consequently 'make' could not find the 
> required files to include and aborted.
> 
> I traced that down to config.status, which contains the result of the 
> _AM_OUTPUT_DEPENDENCY_COMMANDS macro, that checks if a file config.status 
> needs to output, is a Makefile or not.
> This check is done using someting like
>   grep 'generated by Automake' Makefile.
> With ImageMagick-6.2.3 it happens that some lines in the Makefiles are longer 
> than 2048 characters. And on our AIX 5.1 box, grep complains, about too long 
> lines and returns with an error. That means config.status believes that that 
> Makefile is not generated by automake and it does not need to create the .Po 
> files.

Are those long lines created by Automake or are they already present in
Makefile.am?  They are a problem, as you had to learn.  Portably-wise,
they need to be fixed.

If they are Automake-created, it might need to be fixed.

> Would it be possible to replace that
>   if grep '^#.*generated by automake' $mf > /dev/null 2>&1; then
> with
>   if head -1 $mf | grep '^#.*generated by automake' > /dev/null 2>&1; then
> in _AM_OUTPUT_DEPENDENCY_COMMANDS from depout.m4?

I'd rather not do this (but I do not develop Automake).  In any case,
`head -1' does not conform to POSIX and thus possibly not forward-
compatible.  Also, I'd leave at least a few lines for safety, as in
  sed 10q $mf | grep '^#.*generated by automake'

> That would, in our case, work around that particular problem.
> In general such a change would increase the probability that this test does 
> not fail due to such a line limit.

Since other tools (most notable `make') may also impose line length
restrictions, it would be best to kill the long lines.

This is an Automake question, by the way, and as such would have better
gone to its mailing list.  The distinction is difficult to make at
times, though.  :)

Regards,
Ralf