Re: Broken makefile given Autoconf version mismatch

[Andreas Schwab]

Keith Marshall <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wednesday 12 April 2006 8:47 pm, Stepan Kasal wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 12, 2006 at 08:45:04PM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>> > here's a patch that I think does more or less what Bruno's patch
>> > intends to do, against current CVS.
>>
>> I worked on the same issue.  We both use the same pattern
>>         `sed -n '/@datadir@/p;/@docdir@/p;/@infodir@/p...' ...`
>
> I'd like, if I may, to sound a note of caution concerning this sed 
> command syntax: the use of semicolons as command separators in the sed 
> script is an implementation dependent extension, which is not portable.  
> On some platforms, the test using this sed syntax *will* fail, not 
> because the feature you are testing is unsupported, but because the test 
> itself is invalid.
>
> In November 2005, Robert Goulding posted these bug reports on 
> address@hidden:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2005-11/msg00004.html
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2005-11/msg00074.html
>
> It turns out that Robert was having a problem building CVS groff,
> which requires texinfo >= 4.8 to compile the info files, under Mac OS X, 
> and configure was saying his texinfo was too old, in spite of him having 
> explicitly just installed texinfo-4.8.  The actual problem was that the 
> configure test employed a sed command with this same semicolon usage,
> and was not behaving as expected -- the test failed because *it* was 
> invalid, *not* because the detected texinfo was too old!

Is there any evidence that there exists a sed implementation that does not
support the semicolon as command separator?  Note that the thread you
quote above is _not_ about semicolons being unsupported, but rather about
missing ones.  Autoconf is using semicolons in sed expressions already for
many years (eg in the AC_OUTPUT_FILES macro).

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, address@hidden
SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
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