How can I get rid of dinkleberry autotools temp dirs?

[Bruce Korb]

Hi,

Attached is a log of a couple of runs of autoreconf and the
resulting consequences.  Things of note:

1.  with the ``--debug'' option, autoreconf exits with status "0"
    but without it, "1".  Bad.

2.  All the perl autotools tools use a function "mktmpdir" which
    seems to have some magical properties.  This function is not
    documented in any of the Perl man pages I have access to.  It
    seems that it is expected that the directory will just disappear
    at program termination.  It does not.

3.  Autoreconf sets TMPDIR to its temporary directory so that spawned
    tasks (autom4te et al.) use that new directory for their temp
    home.

4.  Because these tools wind up leaving their temporary directories
    around, you get the error message:

>     autoreconf: Leaving directory `.'
>     autoreconf: cannot empty /local/tmp/ar8810.11683: Is a directory
>     $ echo $?
>     1
>     $ find /local/tmp/ar8810.11683
>     /local/tmp/ar8810.11683
>     /local/tmp/ar8810.11683/am4tNcVwla
>     /local/tmp/ar8810.11683/am4t0eEdr4
>     /local/tmp/ar8810.11683/am4tVDkyK5
>     /local/tmp/ar8810.11683/ahOnypvr
>     /local/tmp/ar8810.11683/am4tfAHR8o
>     /local/tmp/ar8810.11683/am4te7Ws2L

5.  I modified autom4te and autoheader to have this line of text at the end:
         xsystem ("set -x ; rm -rf $tmp");
    but you notice that some "am4t*" and "ah*" directories persist.

6.  Adding that to autoreconf fixes the problem, until I get the
    next edition of autoconf.  :)

I can get rid of the dinkleberries with a cron job, but I cannot use
autoreconf with it bailing out with an error code.  I would like to use
autoreconf.  Does anyone have any wild guesses about why these temp
directories get left about?

Thanks - Bruce

broken-autoreconf.txt
Description: Text document