Autotools [SOLVED]

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 4 August 2013 17:23, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ...
>> Actually, I'm seeing this on autoconf itself under some circumstances.
>>  The details elude me so far, but it appears that if I start a fresh
>> shell,
>> $ /usr/bin/autoconf --version
>> will hang, while
>> $ /usr/bin/autoconf --version </dev/null
>> will not.  This is repeatable, but sometimes after I've fooled around
>> with things for a while it stops happening in that shell, so I presume
>> some environment variable changes.
>
> I wonder whether autoconf reads the config file even if --version is
> used.  Do you see the same effect if you change the directory you are
> running autoconf from?  If you also specify --verbose do you see
> anything?
>
> Which version are you using?
>
> Colin

The results when it works are
kevin at treat:~$ autoconf --version </dev/null
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.68
Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+/Autoconf: GNU GPL version 3 or later
<http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>, <http://gnu.org/licenses/exceptions.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by David J. MacKenzie and Akim Demaille.


I've done a bit of investigation, and found the culprit on line 56,
where a "print" command is executed.  For me, this invokes a Perl
script I have in /usr/local/bin that I use to invoke enscript on text
files.  So you're not going to see the same bug.  What you may see is
an invocation of a program from package mime-support which emits
errors that are redirected to /dev/null.  Maybe that's okay, but I
think this is a bit clumsy for autoconf, and it deserves a bug.

In the meanwhile, I'll make my print emit the some errors rather than
wait for input.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.
Please consider the environment before printing this email.