behaviour of PATH argument in AC_PATH_PROG

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hi,

I  was beating myself over the head wondering why my AC_PATH_PROG 
invocation couldn't find iptables.  I'm using autoconf 2.57 on red hat 9.

Here's what I had :

AC_PATH_PROG(IPTABLES, iptables, no, $PATH:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin)

Here's what the info page gives as an example :

     AC_PATH_PROG([INETD], [inetd], [/usr/libexec/inetd],
                  [$PATH:/usr/libexec:/usr/sbin:/usr/etc:etc])

I dug into the resulting configure code and it seems that that code 
interpolates the macro so that is uses a for loop to go over the 
PATH argument.

So, taking a cue from that, I replaced the colons with spaces and now it
works.

I seem to vaguely recall that using colons used to work on older 
autoconfs.  Is this an actual bug ? A feature regression ? Should the info 
page be updated for it ?

If anybody can tell me some more I'm willing to provide a patch to fix 
whatever's necessary for this.

Thanks,
Thomas 

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