Re: Using result of AC_PROG_SED as sed program in config.status

[Paul Eggert]

I'm following up to this proposed patch to Autoconf:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2005-01/msg00038.html

which Albert Chin just pinged us about.  I'm a little reluctant to put
this change in, as it will cause every "configure" command to look for
a nice "sed", even programs that don't need one.  It might be better
to do this only if the Autoconf user asks for it; or perhaps there's
another way out (please see below).


Albert Chin writes:

> Because some Makefile.in's can contain long lines (e.g. kdevelop from KDE),

This appears to me to be a portability bug in Automake and/or
kdevelop, not in Autoconf per se.  POSIX says that Makefiles must be
text files, that text files cannot contain lines longer than LINE_MAX
bytes (counting the trailing newline), and that LINE_MAX might be as
small as 2048.

I just checked kdevelop-050203, which I got from
<http://www.kdevelop.org/>, and found that four of its Makefile.in
files exceed the POSIX limit.  Here's how I found them:

awk '{if (2048 <= length($0)) {print FILENAME ":" FNR}}' \
  $(find * -name Makefile.in -print)

and here is the list of offending lines:

buildtools/autotools/Makefile.in:1145
kdevdesigner/designer/Makefile.in:499
kdevdesigner/designer/pics/Makefile.in:353
kdevdesigner/designer/pics/Makefile.in:538

The first, second, and fourth lines were generated by Automake 1.7.6,
and I presume they are an Automake portability bug.  You might try
rebuilding these files with Automake 1.9.4 and see if the bug still
persists.  (I can't easily rebuild them since I don't have all the KDE
developer tools handy.)

The third line comes from the corresponding Makefile.am, so it is a
portability bug in kdevelop.

I'll CC: this message to address@hidden, so that they know
about the problem.

Incidentally, there are some non-Makefiles in kdevelop that have the
same problem.  Try running this command, and you'll see them:

find * -type f ! -name '*.png' ! -name '*.xcf' -print |
  xargs awk '{if (2048 <= length($0)){print FILENAME ":" FNR }}' /dev/null