`missing' script does not accept --print-ac-dir

[Santiago Vila]

Hello.

To fix a minor documentation bug in the Debian gettext package I
patched the files aclocal.m4 and m4/gettext.m4, among others.

Unfortunately, the Debian m68k build daemon is not too fast and
applied the patches in a way that m4/gettext.m4 was patched a little
bit later than aclocal.m4, so `make' tried to regenerate aclocal.m4
from m4/gettext.m4.

The `missing' script tries to do something sensible (for example, a
simple touch) when there is a missing tool, but when the missing tool
is `aclocal', it fails. Ideally, I think `missing' should accept the
following arguments:

--print-ac-dir
--acdir=aclocal.tmp aclocal

This may be reproduced on a non-Debian system which has not automake
or autoconf installed by doing this:

tar xzvf gettext-0.10.38.tar.gz
cd gettext-0.10.38
touch m4/gettext.m4
./configure
make

[ Yes, I'm going to touch aclocal.m4 in the Debian package as a
workaround, but in either case I think the `missing' script may be
improved for cases like this one ].

Thanks.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 04:05:30 +0200 (CEST)
From: Wouter Verhelst <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: Bug#104746: gettext: build failed on m68k

Package: gettext
Version: 0.10.38-3
Severity: serious

The build of this package failed. From the build log:

Automatic build of gettext_0.10.38-3 on arrakis by sbuild/m68k 1.158
Build started at 20010714-0114
[...]
cd . && ./aclocal.sh /build/buildd/gettext-0.10.38/missing aclocal -I m4
/build/buildd/gettext-0.10.38/missing: Unknown `--print-ac-dir' option
Try `/build/buildd/gettext-0.10.38/missing --help' for more information
cp: cannot stat `/*.m4': No such file or directory
make[1]: *** [aclocal.m4] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/build/buildd/gettext-0.10.38'
make: *** [build] Error 2

[...]