make fails for 2.57 with mingw/msys

[Johan Lindh]

Hi,

I downloaded the source tarball for autoconf-2.57, but I ran into problems when 
making.
autoconf-2.52 does not have this problem.

I am running mingw-2.0.0-3 and MSYS-1.0.8 on Win2K, with ActivePerl 5.6.1.633.

Output from make:

Making all in m4sugar
make[2]: Entering directory `/c/Home/Proj/Apps/autoconf-2.57/lib/m4sugar'
../../tests/autom4te                            \
        --language=m4sugar                      \
        --freeze                        \
        --output=m4sugar.m4f
The system cannot find the path specified.
autom4te: need GNU m4 1.4 or later: /usr/bin/m4
make[2]: *** [m4sugar.m4f] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/c/Home/Proj/Apps/autoconf-2.57/lib/m4sugar'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/c/Home/Proj/Apps/autoconf-2.57/lib'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

When running the test for autom4te, autom4te tries to the following perl call 
which fails:

error "need GNU m4 1.4 or later: $m4"
  if system "$m4 --help </dev/null 2>&1 | grep reload-state >/dev/null";

On closer examination, this seems to be a problem with either, MSYS, perl or 
the autoconfig package.
Running the command manually produces no output (as expected), but no error 
message either.

Switching to the Win2K command prompt and running it, however:
[c:\home\proj\apps\autoconf-2.57] m4 --help </dev/null 2>&1 | grep reload-state 
>/dev/null
4NT: (Sys) The system cannot find the path specified.
 "C:\dev\null"

Removing the /dev/null redirections and running it:
[c:\home\proj\apps\autoconf-2.57] m4 --help 2>&1 | grep reload-state
  -R, --reload-state=FILE      reload a frozen state from FILE at start

Now, this seems interesting, don't it?
But even if I remove those /dev/null redirections from bin/autom4te, I get:

Making all in m4sugar
make[2]: Entering directory `/c/Home/Proj/Apps/autoconf-2.57/lib/m4sugar'
../../tests/autom4te                            \
        --language=m4sugar                      \
        --freeze                        \
        --output=m4sugar.m4f
autom4te: need GNU m4 1.4 or later: /usr/bin/m4
make[2]: *** [m4sugar.m4f] Error 1

So it seems the exit status of the system call is not what is expected.
I don't know how to proceed from here though.

/Johan Lindh