Fixed configure script in tcsh

Written at lunch time in English • Tags: ,

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.