Re: [PATCH] Revert 'Fix logic error in _AC_PROG_LEX_YYTEXT_DECL (#109320)'

[Ross Burton]

I just tested current master and we're working again:

checking for flex... flex
checking for lex output file root... lex.yy
checking for lex library... none needed
checking whether yytext is a pointer... yes

Sorted.

Is it time that autoconf gets some CI to actually exercise all these
paths?  It's own 'make check' followed by building a selection of
representative software seems like it shouldn't be *too* difficult.

Ross

On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 at 01:50, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>
> On 7/16/20 11:40 AM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> > I believe that what's in trunk now should work fine for
> > cross-compilation of programs that don't require yywrap
>
> I thought so too, but after eyeballing the trunk a bit I noticed a shell
> portability bug in the recently-added AC_PROG_LEX code. I then found a couple
> more instances of the same bug elsewhere in Autoconf (in rarely-executed 
> code, I
> think).
>
> The problem is that constructs like ${ac_lib:-none needed} don't conform to
> POSIX, as POSIX requires that the stuff after the :- be a single shell word.
> (The next time I meet Steve Bourne I want to give him an earfull....)
>
> I installed a doc patch describing the portability pitfall into Savannah 
> master:
>
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/autoconf.git/commit/?id=2ff883c27e55b0c0d4a448614c1dee0492c9a7da
>
> and would like to also install the attached patch to fix the code bugs. I have
> held off installing this latter patch, though, as I don't want to get in the 
> way
> of whatever testing you're doing.