Re: gmp-3.1.1 make error on MacOS X

[Kevin Ryde]

Jon Becker <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> In looking through the archives, it appears this was discussed a bit
> back in December.  The problem seems to be that m4 on OS X is broken
> in some way (or perhaps just "different").

Broken.  An old BSD m4 bug due to putting EOF in a "char" (which is
unsigned by default).  Fixed in various ways in Free, Open and Net
BSD, but still hanging around in MacOS and Unicos (though harmlessly
in the latter).

> The m4wrap_prepend
> invocation causes a 0xFF byte to be written at the end of the
> tmp-add_n.s file.

Yep, sorry I forgot that before.

> I "fixed" this by just removing the invocation of m4wrap_prepend from
> asm-defs.m4.  I'm not sure whether or not that might cause other
> problems, but it did allow gmp to finish compiling.  Apparently it
> also works to install GNU m4, which is no doubt a better solution.

Yep.  That m4wrap is only used for some m4 error handling, it's fine
to just delete from mpn/asm-defs.m4 the line

        m4wrap(`m4wrap_string')

> Ultimately, I would hope that a future release would work around this
> problem with a different definition for m4wrap_prepend or some such.

It'll be subject to a configure test.  Had thought about just removing
the stuff that uses it, but it's fairly useful during development.