Cygport: How to add -I m4 to autoreconf / aclocal?

Cygport: How to add -I m4 to autoreconf / aclocal?

[Soegtrop, Michael]

Dear Cygwin Team,

recompiling the package "mingw64-x86_64-gtksourceview3.0-3.24.6" from sources with cygport (In order to generate the debug info) I found that the compile step fails. Aclocal fails in a few macro availability checks. The reason is that aclocal is missing a "-I m4" option to include the local m4 subfolder. I wonder what I need to do in the cygport file to add this. Or should this be added in gnome2_autogen.sh. Autoreconf is called there like this:

autoreconf --verbose --force --install -Wno-portability

which leads to this aclocal call:

autoreconf-2.69: running: aclocal-1.15 --force --warnings=no-portability

which leads to this failure:

configure.ac:161: error: macro GTK_CHECK_BACKEND is not defined; is a m4 file missing?
/usr/share/aclocal/ax_require_defined.m4:35: AX_REQUIRE_DEFINED is expanded from...
configure.ac:161: the top level
autom4te-2.69: /usr/bin/m4 failed with exit status: 1
:
*** ERROR: gnome2: autoreconf failed

It might also be that some global configuration has changed. The strange thing is that the files in the ./m4 folder make it into the aclocal.m4 file, but aclocal also runs m4 including all available files and in this run the files in ./m4 are not included, which leads to the above failure.

I also wonder if the -install option to autoreconf shouldn't be forwarded to aclocal.

Btw.: mingw64-x86_64-gtksourceview3.0-3.24.6 has a rather bad bug (it frees all data structures on any thread exit rather than process exit) which is fixed upstream since a while. Maybe the autoconf issue is the reason why the package has not been updated by the maintainer.

Best regards,

Michael
Intel Deutschland GmbH
Registered Address: Am Campeon 10-12, 85579 Neubiberg, Germany
Tel: +49 89 99 8853-0, www.intel.de
Managing Directors: Christin Eisenschmid, Gary Kershaw
Chairperson of the Supervisory Board: Nicole Lau
Registered Office: Munich
Commercial Register: Amtsgericht Muenchen HRB 186928

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple

Re: Cygport: How to add -I m4 to autoreconf / aclocal?

[Hans-Bernhard Bröker]

Am 05.06.2019 um 11:53 schrieb Soegtrop, Michael:

The reason is that aclocal is missing a "-I m4" option to include the
local m4 subfolder. I wonder what I need to do in the cygport file to
add this. Or should this be added in gnome2_autogen.sh.

If that had to be done, that would constitute a clear upstream bug.
Well, either that or that file itself should not be there.

Are we building this from a tarball, or directly off the bleeding edge?

"Autogen" scripts like that should usually only exist in Git/SVN/CVS
versions of the source, but not in release tarballs.  Those are supposed
to be packaged with all autoconfigury already built and included, and
the autogen script itself left out instead.

> configure.ac:161: error: macro GTK_CHECK_BACKEND is not defined; is a m4 file missing?
> /usr/share/aclocal/ax_require_defined.m4:35: AX_REQUIRE_DEFINED is expanded from...
> configure.ac:161: the top level

The name prefix AX_ indicates a non-standard macro.  This particular one
is available in the autoconf-archive package in Cygwin (hence the
generic install location, instead of the version-specific ones where all
our actual aclocal versions' files are kept).  Linux distros may package
it differently.

But source packages using such non-standard macros may be assuming
different versions of them than we have.  Which is all the more reason
they really have to include them, in their own version control.

> I also wonder if the -install option to autoreconf shouldn't be forwarded to aclocal.

If autoreconf itself isn't doing that, we quite probably shouldn't, either.

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple