Re: Broken makefile given Autoconf version mismatch

[Paul Eggert]

Stepan Kasal <address@hidden> writes:

> semicolons cannot be used inside
> curly braces, so you have to write, for example:
>
> sed '/datarootdir/{
>       p
>       q
>     }'
>
> IIRC, Autoconf was recently fixed to obey this rule,

Yes, here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2006-01/msg00005.html

and CVS Automake was fixed at about the same time:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2006-01/msg00014.html

> sed '/datarootdir/{p
> }'
> is correct according to POSIX, yet I think some implementations are not
> able to parse it.)

Hmm, which would those be?  We should probably document the exact
problem in the Autoconf manual.  I just checked 7th Edition Unix 'sed'
(dated January 1979) and it worked OK.  So these implementations would
either have had a bug introduced, or have been independent of the late
Lee McMahon's original implementation.