[Rd] configure problem in R-devel caused by conditionals

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 14 Sep 2003, Simon Urbanek wrote:

> I re-generated configure of the latest R-devel with autoconf 2.57 and 
> got the following problem:
> 
> configure: error: conditional "HAVE_ORBIT" was never defined.
> Usually this means the macro was only invoked conditionally.
> 
> (resolving HAVE_ORBIT leaves us with HAVE_GNORBA causing the same 
> problem. You should be able to reproduce it by running autoreconf (or 
> aclocal; autoconf - not just autoconf!) and configure on the r-devel 
> tree).
> 
> The culprit is primarily located in acinclude.m4, namely the macro 
> GNOME_GNORBA_HOOK (used by GNOME_GNORBA_CHECK)
> afaik it's never used in configure.ac (I couldn't find it at least), 
> but the conditionals are "seen" by autoconf. Since all conditionals 
> must be properly defined, it bails out.
> (from automake docs: The shell condition (suitable for use in a shell 
> if statement) is evaluated when configure is run.  Note that you must 
> arrange for every AM_CONDITIONAL to be invoked *every* time configure 
> is run - if AM_CONDITIONAL is run conditionally (e.g., in a shell if 
> statement), then the result will confuse automake. )
> 
> Removing those macros from acinclude.m4 resolves the issue.
> 
> But, I'm wondering: in the m4 directory the README states that the 
> files in m4 are used to create acinclude.m4 - is that done by hand or 
> is there any "official" way to do it? There is no script called 
> 'bootstrap' in the root dir so the whole autoconf process seems to be 
> non-standartized ... (ok, in the develper docs it says that one should 
> simply run autoconf .. but then such issues as the above won't become 
> visible as autoconf doesn't call aclocal, whereas e.g. autoreconf does 
> ...). So, how is the 'official' configure created?

configure --enable-maintainer-mode
make

and I think that is as `official' a way as any.  FWIW, autoconf works for 
me on 2.57.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595