Re: Building fails on Debian woody because of stupid autoconf wrapper

[Andreas Schwab]

Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:

|> I've just tried to compile emacs using autoconf-2.52 with the new
|> patches, and things break slightly because of the following line in
|> `configure.in':
|> 
|>   configuration=$host_alias
|> 
|> The problem is that in autoconf-2.13, `host_alias' was always set, if
|> not by the user via the configure command line, then by autoconf using
|> config.guess.  In autoconf-2.52, on the other hand, host_alias is only
|> set if the user actually specifies a host on the configure command line.
|> 
|> Among other things, this leads to `exec-directory' having the wrong
|> value, so describe-variable/function don't work.
|> 
|> I changed it to:
|> 
|>   configuration=${host_alias:-$host}

Yes, that looks ok, except that you should probably use
${host_alias-$host} (without the colon) which is more portable.  I didn't
notice because I always explicitly specify a host.

|> which seems to solve the problem for me, but I'm not entirely sure if
|> it's the correct fix (is there really any reason not to just use $host
|> unconditionally?).

$host is the canonicalized version of $host_alias, which can be different.
We probably want to prefer the name that the user specified.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab                                  "And now for something
address@hidden                          completely different."
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