I noticed that tcsh 6.22.02 has a broken configure
script:
./configure: gl_HOST_CPU_C_ABI_32BIT: not found
This looked like an unexpanded m4
macro to me. I was unable to reproduce the error if I ran autoreconf
under Debian buster, so I switched to a NetBSD host and tried there. Indeed, running autoreconf
resulted in the same broken configure script.
Upon closer inspection, it turns out that devel/gettext-m4 had been updated to a new version in pkgsrc without noticing that generated configure
scripts now throw an error. The cause was a missing file (host-cpu-c-abi.m4
).
For some reason the package Makefile
has a hardcoded list of files to install from gettext-tools/gnulib-m4
(as opposed to calling the install target via make
). The reason is probably to avoid unnecessary or irrelevant files. However, this means that any relevant changes to gettext-tools/gnulib-m4/Makefile
can easily go unnoticed.
I’ve added the missing file to the list, but I worry that this approach is prone to errors. Perhaps some easy check could be added and noted in the package Makefile
to detect problems, e.g. generating a sample configure
script before committing a version update.