Patch: Too many files in AC_OUTPUT cause M4 error

[Martin Frydl]

Hello,

  I'm using Autoconf 2.56, Automake 1.7.1 and M4 1.4.1. When I add too 
many files (or too long paths) to AC_OUTPUT, running automake ends with

    M4: Error matching regular expression `^ *\(.*\) *$'

  Automake runs autoconf with several --trace options to get output it 
can simply parse. This runs several M4 macros which lead to at_flatten 
and at_patsubst macros. Here, M4 does not like the at_patsubst(...,[^ 
*\(.*\) *$],[[\1]]) expression (the one stripping spaces from the 
begining and end of files list). I've found the error occurs when the 
total length of pathnames is about 3000 characters (after any previous 
space squeezing). When the regexp is shortened to [^ *\(.*\)] only, 
everything works. It probably has something to do with regexp evaluation 
in M4 since this expression in fact means "remove leading spaces and 
copy rest to \1". Moreover, stripping from the end of string seems to be 
not working since * inside parentheses is "greedy" and consumes also 
ending space.
  There are two solutions here. First, just remove " *$" from regexp. 
It won't strip terminating space but it does not anyway. Second, I've 
created a patch which is aware of M4 problem and separates the task into 
two expressions - first removes the terminating space, then strips the 
leading one and puts brackets around.
  The same problem exists with Autoconf 2.52, but former automake has 
not used the --trace feature so it was hidden.
  Can someone look at this and let me know?

  Thanks
    Martin

    * bin/autom4te.in (at_flatten): rewritten to avoid M4 problem when
    \(.*\) match is too long and there is something more to be checked.

Index: autom4te.in
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/autoconf/autoconf/bin/autom4te.in,v
retrieving revision 1.77
diff -u -r1.77 autom4te.in
--- autom4te.in 31 Oct 2002 08:37:20 -0000      1.77
+++ autom4te.in 22 Nov 2002 16:34:37 -0000
@@ -941,9 +941,10 @@
   # Note that the second pattern is `newline, tab or space'.  Don't lose
   # the tab!
   define([at_flatten],
-  [at_patsubst(at_patsubst(at_patsubst([[[$1]]], [\\\n]),
-                           [[\n\t ]+], [ ]),
-               [^ *\(.*\) *$], [[\1]])])
+  [at_patsubst(at_patsubst(at_patsubst(at_patsubst([[[[$1]]]], [\\\n]),
+                                       [[\n\t ]+], [ ]),
+                           [ *\(.\)$],[\1]),
+               [^ *\(.*\)], [[\1]])])
 
   define([at_args],    [at_shift(at_shift(at_shift(at_shift(at_shift($@)))))])
   define([at_at],      [_$0([$1], at_args($@))])