Automake generates a Makefile rule for regenerating the configure
script, that relies on an invocation of ‘autoconf’ always bumping the
timestamp on the configure script, even if it hasn’t changed.
The patch to make autom4te update the output file atomically
(1725c94714) broke this.
Fixes several failures in automake’s test suite.
* bin/autom4te.in (handle_output): Always call update_file with force=1.
* tests/tools.at (autoconf: timestamp changes): New test.
While testing something else, I noticed that autom4te may print a
nonsensical error message when it fails to create autom4te.cache,
because it checks again whether the directory already exists before
giving up, and this clobbers errno.
Instead of doing (the perl equivalent of)
test -d $cache || mkdir $cache || test -d $cache
call mkdir unconditionally. If it fails with an errno code other than
EEXIST, consider that a hard failure; if it fails with EEXIST, check
whether the thing that exists is in fact a directory. (A symlink to
a directory qualifies; I wouldn’t be surprised if people are moving
autom4te.cache around with symlinks.)
Either way, if we fail, report strerror(errno) from the original
mkdir failure. Also, print the current working directory as part
of the error message; this aids debugging when you’re working with a
big hairy nested tree.
* bin/autom4te.in: Don’t check whether autom4te.cache exists before
attempting to create it. Only stat autom4te.cache if mkdir fails
with EEXIST, otherwise fail immediately. Make sure to report the
errno code from mkdir, not the subsequent stat (if any). Report
the current working directory as part of the error message.
* tests/tools.at: Verify that autom4te reports the actual reason when
it fails to create autom4te.cache. Verify that failure to create
autom4te.cache because that name exists, but isn’t a directory,
is detected.
In testing on Darwin (OSX), sometimes warnings reported from M4 code
reach autom4te with no stack trace at all, causing the perl script to
crash with a “use of uninitialized value” error. The root cause of
the problem is not clear to me, but the script certainly shouldn’t
crash.
Problem found by Jannick <thirdedition@gmx.net>.
* bin/autom4te.in: When processing warnings, make sure $stacktrace is
defined.
Despite what the documentation says, ‘new File::Temp’ does not work
reliably in perl 5.6.x. Rather than figure out exactly what is wrong
with it, let’s just stick to ‘tempfile’.
* bin/autom4te.in (handle_output): Use tempfile function instead of
object-oriented File::Temp interface.
* bin/autoreconf.in (install_aux_file): Likewise.
In 2003, Joey Hess reported the following bug against Debian's
autoconf package (see http://bugs.debian.org/221483):
I noticed that if I ctrl-c autoconf, it can leave a partially
written, executable configure script. I was lucky enough to
get a configure script that exited with a shell parse error,
but if I had been unlucky, it might have exited 0 without
doing all the tests I expected it to do. That would have
sucked to ship to users.
There are many ways to update a file in a way that is not
prone to these problems, and I suggest that autoconf adopt
one of them.
Ben Pfaff wrote a patch to make autom4te replace the output file
atomically; Debian has carried it since 2006. He submitted it
to autoconf upstream in 2008 but it never went anywhere.
I (Zack) have dusted off the patch and made some minor improvements:
using File::Temp (with DIR set to the directory of the output file)
instead of a predictable temporary file name, and using
Autom4te::FileUtils::update_file instead of File::Copy::move.
I do not attempt to test the fix (the test would be inherently racey)
nor do I have autom4te delete the temp file if it crashes while the
file is being written (there is no way to do this with 100%
reliability and it strikes me as likely to cause more problems than it
solves).
Fixes our bug #110305.
* bin/autom4te.in (handle_output): When $output is to a regular or
nonexistent file, write to a temporary file in the same directory
and then rename it over $output after completion.
ChannelDefs.pm *ought* to be kept in sync between automake and autoconf,
because it defines the set of valid -W options, and autoreconf assumes
that it can pass arbitrary -W options to all of the tools it invokes.
However, it isn’t covered by either project’s ‘make fetch’ and it hasn’t
actually *been* in sync for more than 17 years.
This patch manually brings over all of the changes made on the
automake side. Once the complementary patch is applied by the
automake team, both versions of the file will be the same, and then we
can add it to the list in fetch.pl and not have this problem any more
in the future.
There are some user-visible consequences to bringing this file back
into sync. The only one worth mentioning in NEWS is that the ‘obsolete’
category of warnings is now on by default. This had quite a bit of
fallout throughout the testsuite. There are also some new warning
categories that get mentioned in --help output, but we don’t actually
generate any warnings in those categories, so people using ‘-Wall’
won’t see any change. More diagnostics are automatically tagged with
‘warning:’ or ‘error:’, which also had some fallout in the testsuite.
Finally, ‘-Werror’ no longer causes complaints about unknown warning
categories to be treated as hard errors.
Internally, there are some small API changes: ‘parse_warnings’ is no
longer usable as a ‘getopt’ callback function, and we now have a stub
Autom4te/Config.pm to match the automake code’s expectations. (This
file *should* also be synced from automake by ‘make fetch’, but we
can’t quite do that yet because it’s a generated file and our build
system is not prepared to handle adding *two* directories to @INC when
running a not-yet-installed Perl script. I plan to fix that after 2.70.)
As a side-effect of adding a Config.pm, ‘prog_error’ now says to
report the bug to bug-autoconf, not bug-automake. If this is why we
mostly haven’t been using prog_error for internal errors, we can stop
avoiding it. (I did not change anything to use prog_error in this
patch.)
* lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm: Merge from automake.
* lib/Autom4te/Config.pm: New file.
* lib/local.mk (dist_perllib_DATA): Add Autom4te/Config.pm.
* bin/autoconf.as: Update list of warning categories to match
Autom4te::ChannelDefs::usage.
* bin/autoheader.in (@warnings): New global.
(parse_args): Don’t use parse_warnings as a getopt callback.
(main): Add warnings options from our command line to $autoconf.
No need to turn on 'obsolete' warnings explicitly.
No need to include "warning: " in warning messages.
* bin/autom4te.in (parse_args): Don’t use parse_warnings as a getopt callback.
(main): No need to include "warning: " in warning messages.
* bin/autoreconf.in (parse_args): parse_warnings now takes only one argument.
* bin/autoupdate.in: Set WARNINGS=none in environment for all child processes.
* tests/local.at
(AT_CHECK_M4): Handle `autom4te: error: /usr/bin/m4 ...` like
`autom4te: /usr/bin/m4 ...`.
(_AT_CHECK_AC_MACRO): Add AUTOCONF-FLAGS argument, passed to both
autoconf and autoheader.
(AT_CHECK_MACRO): Default AUTOCONF-FLAGS argument to empty.
Pass that argument to autoheader as well as autoconf.
(AT_CHECK_AU_MACRO): Expect a “macro ‘NAME’ is obsolete’ diagnostic
on the first run of autoconf. Pass -Wno-obsolete to autoconf on the
second run, and to autoheader on both runs.
* tests/base.at
* tests/c.at
* tests/compile.at
* tests/m4sh.at
* tests/m4sugar.at
* tests/semantics.at
* tests/tools.at
* tests/torture.at:
No need to pass -Wobsolete to autoconf.
Pass -Wno-obsolete to autoheader where needed to avoid handling
the same warning twice.
Update various expectations for diagnostics to match behavior
changes.
* tests/tools.at (autoupdating AU_ALIAS): Add an AC_CONFIG_HEADERS
line to the test configure.ac to eliminate an unrelated diagnostic.
Search-and-replace change ‘use warnings;’ to ‘use warnings FATAL => 'all';’
in all Perl code.
Notwithstanding the dire cautions in ‘perldoc warnings’ about this,
I think it’s the right call for us. One file was already doing it.
No new testsuite failures are observed on Linux with Perl 5.30.3
nor on NetBSD with Perl 5.6.1.
* bin/autoheader.in, bin/autom4te.in, bin/autoreconf.in
* bin/autoscan.in, bin/autoupdate.in, bin/ifnames.in
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm, lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Channels.pm, lib/Autom4te/Configure_ac.pm
* lib/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm, lib/Autom4te/General.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Request.pm, lib/Autom4te/XFile.pm:
Make all warnings from the Perl interpreter into fatal errors.
All the Perl scripts and modules now ‘use’ other modules in the
following order:
- use 5.006; use strict; use warnings; in that order.
If a file was not already use-ing one of these three, it was added.
- The BEGIN block that adds the installation directory for the
Autom4te:: modules to @INC, if necessary.
- All stdlib modules whose name begins with a capital letter,
in ASCII sort order.
- All Autom4te:: modules, in ASCII sort order.
- ‘use vars qw (...)’, if any, last.
Also, ‘use foo qw (...)’ and @ISA lists have been sorted into ASCII
sort order. (@EXPORT lists, which often follow immediately after @ISA
lists, have *not* been sorted, as these appear to have been organized
semantically in many cases.) qw delimiters have been normalized to
round parentheses with a space between the qw and the open paren.
* bin/autoheader.in, bin/autom4te.in, bin/autoreconf.in
* bin/autoscan.in, bin/autoupdate.in, bin/ifnames.in
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm, lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Channels.pm, lib/Autom4te/Configure_ac.pm
* lib/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm, lib/Autom4te/General.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Getopt.pm, lib/Autom4te/Request.pm
* lib/Autom4te/XFile.pm: Rationalize order and format of ‘use’
directives and @ISA lists. Add any of ‘use 5.006’, ‘use strict’,
and ‘use warnings’ that was not already present.
Some downstream redistributors for Autoconf wish to use
‘/usr/bin/env perl’ as the #! line for the installed Perl scripts.
This does not work with command-line options on the #! line, as the
kernel doesn’t support supplying more than one argument to a #!
interpreter (this limitation is universal across Unixes that
support #!, as far as I know).
Remove ‘-w’ from all perl #! lines and instead add ‘use warnings’
to all the scripts and .pm files that didn’t already have it.
This ‘use’ directive was added to Perl in version 5.6.0 (aka 5.006)
so there is no change to our minimum Perl requirement.
(It is necessary to add ‘use warnings’ to all the .pm files as well as
the scripts, because the ‘-w’ command-line option turns on warnings
globally, but ‘use warnings’ does so only for the current lexical scope.)
Patch uplifted from OpenEmbedded, originally by Serhii Popovych.
It’s a mechanical search-and-replace change so I do not believe a
copyright assignment is necessary.
* bin/autom4te.in, bin/autoreconf.in, bin/autoscan.in
* bin/autoupdate.in, bin/ifnames.in: Remove -w from #! line
and add ‘use warnings’ to imports.
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm, lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Channels.pm, lib/Autom4te/Configure_ac.pm
* lib/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm, lib/Autom4te/General.pm
* lib/Autom4te/Request.pm, lib/Autom4te/XFile.pm:
Add ‘use warnings’ to imports.
We generate manpages for autoconf’s installed programs (autoconf,
autoheader, etc.) using help2man, which runs each program in order to
learn its --help output. Each manpage therefore has a dependency on
the existence of the corresponding program, but this dependency is
intentionally left out of the Makefile so that one can build from a
tarball release (which will include prebuilt manpages) without having
help2man installed.
But when building from a git checkout with high levels of
parallelism (-j20 or so), the missing dependency can lead to build
failures, because help2man will try to run the program before it
exists. In an earlier patch I tried to work around this with a
recursive make invocation in the ‘.x.1’ rule, to ensure the existence
of the program. That only traded one concurrency bug for another, now
we could have two jobs trying to build the same program simultaneously
and they would clobber each other’s work and the build would still
fail.
Instead, this patch introduces a utility script ‘help-extract.pl’ that
reads --help and --version information directly from the source code
for each program. This utility, wrapped appropriately for each
program, is what help2man now runs. Usage is a little weird because
help2man doesn’t let you specify any arguments to the “executable”
that it runs, but it works, and lets us write all of the true
dependencies of each manpage into the Makefile without naming any file
that would be created during a build from a tarball. help-extract.pl
is a Perl script, so it introduces no new build-time requirements.
A downside is that we have to make sure each of the script sources in
bin/, and also part of lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm, are parseable by
help-extract. The most important constraints are that the text output
by --help must be defined in a global variable named ‘help’, and its
definition has to be formatted just the way these definitions are
currently formatted. Similarly for --version. Furthermore, only some
non-literal substitutions are possible in these texts; each has to be
explicitly supported in help-extract.pl. The current list of supported
substitutions is $0, @PACKAGE_NAME@, @VERSION@, @RELEASE_YEAR@, and
Autom4te::ChannelDefs::usage.
The generated manpages themselves are character-for-character
identical before and after this patch.
* build-aux/help-extract.pl: New build script that extracts --help
and --version output from manpages.
* man/autoconf.w, man/autoheader.w, man/autom4te.w, man/autoreconf.w
* man/autoscan.w, man/autoupdate.w, man/ifnames.w: New shell scripts
which wrap build-aux/help-extract.pl.
* man/local.mk: Generate each manpage by running help2man on the
corresponding .w script, not on the built utility itself.
Revise all dependencies to match.
* bin/autoconf.as: Rename ‘usage’ variable to ‘help’ and
‘help’ variable to ‘usage_err’.
* bin/autoheader.in: Call Autom4te::ChannelDefs::usage with no
function-call parentheses, matching all the other scripts.
* bin/autom4te.in: Initialize $version with a regular double-quoted
string, not a heredoc, matching all the other scripts.
* bin/autoscan.in: Remove global variable $configure_scan.
Problem reported in <https://bugs.debian.org/219621>.
* bin/autom4te.in: Save and check autom4te version number into cache index.
* lib/Autom4te/C4che.pm (save): New arg $version. All callers changed.
(good_version): New sub.
* bin/autom4te.in (handle_traces): When $output is '-', use
stdout rather than creating a file named '-'. This fixes a problem
introduced by the recent port to the new Autom4te::XFile API.
Done via 'make update-copyright', since all files are effectively
modified and distributed this year via public version control.
* all files: Update copyright year.
Done via 'make update-copyright', since all files are effectively
modified and distributed this year via public version control.
* all files: Update copyright year.
As per updated GCS recommendations.
* bin/autoconf.as, bin/autoreconf.in, bin/autoscan.in, ifnames.in,
bin/autoupdate.in: Throughout these files.
* bin/autoheader.in, bin/autom4te.in: Likewise. Also, remove some
useless escaping of the "'" single-quote characters, and reformat
some message for better line wrapping.
Signed-off-by: Stefano Lattarini <stefano.lattarini@gmail.com>
* bin/autom4te.in (_m4_warn): Pass warnings through the channels
machinery as a single chunk, to avoid partial filtering.
* lib/m4sugar/m4sugar.m4 (_m4_warn): Document the conventions.
* tests/m4sugar.at (m4@&t@_warn): Enhance test to catch this.
Reported by Bruno Haible.
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
* configure.ac (PERL_FLOCK): New substitution variable with test
whether Fcntl::flock is implemented by the system.
* bin/Makefile.am (edit): Substitute @PERL_FLOCK@.
* bin/autom4te.in: Call XFile::lock only if flock is
implemented.
Signed-off-by: Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues@gmx.de>
* bin/autom4te.in (handle_traces): Don't flatten leading and
trailing space, since tracing spacing bugs can be useful.
* tests/tools.at (autom4te --trace and whitespace): New test.
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <ebb9@byu.net>
M4sugar requires GNU m4 extensions to be enabled. Override
POSIXLY_CORRECT using -g.
* m4/m4.m4: Unset POSIXLY_CORRECT during first test. Test for -g.
Warn user if he has POSIXLY_CORRECT set but -g is not supported.
* bin/Makefile.am: Substitute @M4_GNU@ into generated files.
* bin/autom4te.in: Pass @M4_GNU@ to m4.
M4sugar requires GNU m4 extensions to be enabled. Override
POSIXLY_CORRECT using -g.
2009-07-12 Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org>
* m4/m4.m4: Test for -g.
* bin/Makefile.am: Substitute @M4_GNU@ into generated files.
* bin/autom4te.in: Pass @M4_GNU@ to m4.
* bin/autom4te.in: Do not error out if another `autom4te'
instance created the cache directory before we could.
Signed-off-by: Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues@gmx.de>
* bin/autom4te.in: Adjust comments, now that we rely on 1.4.5+.
(files_to_options): Avoid inheriting __m4_version__ from frozen
file if current M4 does not support it.
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <ebb9@byu.net>
* bin/autom4te.in (handle_output): Substitute @{:@ and @:}@.
(handle_traces): Likewise.
* lib/m4sugar/m4sugar.m4 (m4_qlen): Account for new quadrigraphs.
* tests/autotest.at (AT_CHECK_AT_TITLE_CHAR): Add new tests.
* doc/autoconf.texi (Quadrigraphs): Document them.
(Evaluation Macros) <m4_expand>: Enhance documentation.
(Text processing Macros) <m4_text_box>: Document cases where
quadrigraphs can help for problemetic unbalanced parentheses.
(Pretty Help Strings) <AS_HELP_STRING>: Likewise.
(Writing Testsuites) <AT_SETUP>: Likewise.
(Limitations of Builtins) <case>: Consolidate text on unbalanced
parentheses, and add an example of creative comments.
* NEWS: Document the addition.
Reported by Joel E. Denny.
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <ebb9@byu.net>
Return back to GPLv2+, until the text of the exceptions is
finalized, reverting the change from 2007-07-03 and the first
part of the change from 2007-07-20.
Also:
* COPYING: Revert to GPLv2.
* COPYINGv3: New file, since some auxiliary build tools, used for
building autoconf and not installed, are GPLv3.
* Makefile.am (EXTRA_DIST): Distribute COPYINGv3.
* NEWS: Remove mention of GPLv3.
* README: Clarify situation regarding GPLv3.
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <ebb9@byu.net>
This includes escaping of characters special to the shell
as well as special to Perl, e.g., leading `<' or `>'.
For example, when $file starts with `>', `open ">$file"'
wrongly tries to append to a different file.
* bin/autoconf.as: Fix quoting for autom4te options.
* lib/Autom4te/General.pm (shell_quote): New function, taken
from coreutils, written by Jim Meyering.
(mktmpdir): Use it.
* bin/autom4te.in (files_to_options, handle_m4): Use shell_quote
and open_quote.
* bin/autoreconf.in (parse_args): Likewise.
* bin/autoscan.in (main): Likewise.
* bin/autoupdate.in (main): Likewise.
* bin/autoheader.in: Likewise, fixing old insufficient escaping.
* bin/ifnames.in: Likewise, XFile usage fixes.
* tests/tools.at (autom4te and whitespace in file names): Extend
test. Test twice, with special characters allowed on w32, and the
rest. Test leading and trailing whitespace, for `open_quote'.
(autotools and whitespace in file names): New, analogous test.
Reported by Paul Eggert and Benoit Sigoure, additional suggestions
by Russ Allbery and Eric Blake.
