Re: [Nmh-workers] Ready to roll a new release?

[Igor Sobrado]

In message <address@hidden>, Jon Steinhart writes:
> I haven't paid much attention to stuff over the holidays.  I did
> notice that Josh made a bunch of cosmetic changes (that I'm not
> sure that I agree with but hey, that's the way it goes).  Are the
> NetBSD issues resolved at this point so that it's worth rolling
> a new release?  Oh, and Happy New Year to all of you.

Hi,

I see a last issue.  The problem happens in OpenBSD and NetBSD if the
GNU version of the m4 macro language processor is not available.
After applying the patch:

$ patch < ../patch
Hmm...  Looks like a unified diff to me...
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|--- configure.in.orig  2005-12-15 11:45:36.000000000 +1100
|+++ configure.in       2005-12-23 09:07:29.000000000 +1100
--------------------------
Patching file configure.in using Plan A...
Hunk #1 succeeded at 603.
Hmm...  The next patch looks like a unified diff to me...
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|--- aclocal.m4.orig    2005-12-15 11:45:36.000000000 +1100
|+++ aclocal.m4 2005-12-23 09:14:06.000000000 +1100
--------------------------
Patching file aclocal.m4 using Plan A...
Hunk #1 succeeded at 44.
Hunk #2 succeeded at 59.
Hunk #3 succeeded at 73.
done

autoconf-2.52 fails with this odd error:

$ autoreconf
m4: unexpected end of input, unclosed parenthesis:
   configure.in at line 13
m4: unexpected end of input, unclosed parenthesis:
   configure.in at line 13
autoconf-2.52: tracing failed

I suspect that it is a consequence of a different behaviour between
the BSD m4 macro language processor and GNU m4.

(as a part of the installation of autoconf in the NetBSD machine,
I added GNU m4 because it is a prerequisite for this package).

$ which m4 gm4
/usr/bin/m4
/usr/pkg/bin/gm4

(gm4 is the GNU version of the macro language processor.)

Now I will make the new configuration script in a NetBSD machine
that has both the BSD and GNU m4 preprocessors and move it to the
OpenBSD server.  After running configure:

[...]
$ make
cd . && autoheader
m4: unexpected end of input, unclosed parenthesis:
   configure.in at line 13
autoconf-2.52: tracing failed
*** Error code 1

Stop in /home/sobrado/tmp/nmh-1.2 (line 152 of Makefile).

Now, I will move the modified tarball to a NetBSD machine that does
not have the GNU flavour of m4 installed.  The message is different
and certainly annoying:

[...]
$ make
cd . && autoheader
autoheader: not found
*** Error code 127

Stop.
make: stopped in /home/sobrado/tmp/nmh-1.2

(certainly autoheader is part of the autoconf suite, but it should
not be required to build a nmh release.)  Ok, I probably did a mistake
using autoconf, we should seriously consider this possibility.

We should not have GNU m4 as a prerequisite for compiling nmh or building
a new configure script, though.  Don't know what happens in the NetBSD
machine that does not have autoconf/(GNU's) m4 installed.

Can I help in some way?

Cheers,
Igor.