ax_enable_builddir macro

[Julian C. Cummings]

Hi Guido,

 

I have been making use of your ax_enable_builddir.m4 macro to construct an architecture-specific build directory on the fly, and I find it very helpful.  But I have discovered one minor bug that should be fixed.  In this macro, after checking for the sed program and any enable/disable builddir option, there is the line

 

test ".$SUB" = ".." && SUB=`$SED -V 2>&1 |$SED -e '/GNU/!d' -e 's/.*/yes/'`

 

The -V in this line is being used to obtain the version info message from sed.  When I used this macro on a platform running AIX 5.1, it failed.  There is a GNU sed available on this platform, but it is version 4.1.1.  It appears that in sed version 4.0 and beyond, it is no longer supporting the -V flag.  You must use --version instead, which is backwards-compatible with older versions of GNU sed.  So I would request that you change -V to --version in ax_enable_builddir.m4.

 

Another problem that I have with this macro is the use of the HOST environment variable.  On most platforms that I have worked on, HOST is set to the name of the machine when I login.  Obviously, this is not a good choice for the build directory name in most situations.  So I have had to unset HOST in my environment in order for the macro to behave as I expected.  I'm not sure if this setting of HOST is specific to my shell (tcsh) or not.  I've noticed that the environment variable HOSTNAME is usually also set to the name of the machine, so there is some unnecessary duplication.  In any case, how difficult would it be to change the use of HOST to some other environment variable name like CONFIG_HOST?

 

Regards, Julian C.

 

Dr. Julian C. Cummings
Staff Scientist, CACR/Caltech
(626) 395-2543
address@hidden