#1920 autoconf-2.69 does not biuld

[Chris Johns]

The RTEMS project uses autoconf-2.69 and it does not build with MSYS because m4 is consider too old. The message given is ..

configure: error: no acceptable m4 could be found in $PATH.
GNU M4 1.4.6 or later is required; 1.4.16 or newer is recommended.
GNU M4 1.4.15 uses a buggy replacement strstr on some systems.
Glibc 2.9 - 2.12 and GNU M4 1.4.11 - 1.4.15 have another strstr bug.

$ m4 --version
m4 (GNU M4) 1.4.14
Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.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 Rene' Seindal.
$ mingw-get update
[snip]
$ mingw-get upgrade msys-m4
upgrade: m4-1.4.14-1-msys-1.0.13-bin.tar.lzma
mingw-get.exe: *** INFO *** package m4-1.4.14-1-msys-1.0.13-bin.tar.lzma is up to date

[Earnie Boyd]

As time permits.

[Chris Johns]

I understand. Any thing I can do to help ? I am not across how these packages are maintained.

An observation ... just because autoconf now rejects these m4 versions does not imply previous version of autoconf which did not reject them did not suffer the effects of these bugs in m4.

[Earnie Boyd]

Ticket moved from /p/mingw/feature-requests/118/

[Keith Marshall]

Is this still an issue? I haven't used MSYS, for any significant development work, in over five years now, but I do use autoconf-2.69 on my LinuxMint box; I don't recall what version I last used on MSYS.

Since Charles Wilson is no longer an active MinGW.org Project participant, we may be fairly certain that he will not follow this up; perhaps Cesar would care to comment?