I removed m4_syscmd, ..., because they were not working on either
Mac
OS/X or RHEL3.
Hmm, why not? Shouldn't they be working? What versions of m4 and
Autoconf
were you using? Let's try to see what the underlying problem is
first,
before removing this from regex.m4.
Well, I have to admit, I'm not an expert at autoconf or m4... The
versions I'm using are
autoconf: 2.59; m4: 1.4 (on Mac OS/X 10.3)
Autoconf: 2.59; m4: 1.4.1 (on RHEL 3).
You should upgrade to m4 1.4.3, unless these older m4 versions have
been patched heavily.
In both cases running sh -vx configure showed that these looked like
they were not doing anything at all. That is, it was as if they were
comments and the enclosed code was just eliminated.
That's the expected behavior. The m4_syscmd code is executed when
'autoconf' is run, not when 'configure' is run. So it sounds like
things were working correctly for you.