Tcl - syntax error in configure?

Author

syntax error in configure?

billposer@alum.mit.edu

2006-01-25, 4:12 am

I just tried to compile Tcl 8.4.12 on my Linux machine and got a syntax
error at line 7653 of the
configure script. I haven't encountered this before, and hesitate to
file a bug report since it seems
rather unlikely that a bad configure script is in use. Has anyone else
encountered anything like
this? The shell that is executing the configure script is GNU bash
3.1.0.

Arjen Markus

2006-01-25, 4:12 am

Something similar occurred in TEA - Jeff Hobbs posted an announcement
the other day of this being solved in TEA 3.5.
If it is the same thing, it is a quoting issue that makes the latest
bash shell stumble.

Regards,

Arjen

Donal K. Fellows

2006-01-26, 7:59 am

billposer@alum.mit.edu wrote:
> I just tried to compile Tcl 8.4.12 on my Linux machine and got a syntax
> error at line 7653 of the configure script.

Known (ancient) problem. Will be fixed in the next release of Tcl, but
it's a two line fix anyway. :-) If you want to fix it yourself rather
than wait, open up the configure script in a text editor, search for
relid' (with that single quote) and remove that offending quote
character, making sure to leave the backquote immediately after. There
are two places that need fixing, and the fix is the same in both. And
that's it.

The odd thing is that nobody spotted this problem before bash 3.1 as far
as I can tell...

Donal.

Donal K. Fellows

2006-01-26, 9:57 pm

billposer@alum.mit.edu wrote:
> Thanks. I compiled successfully. I'm curious where the problem arises
> though. configure is usually generated completely automatically. If
> autoconf had a bug in it, I would think it would have been
> caught by now. Or is there a big of hand-coded stuff in the Tcl
> configure?

The bug was in tcl.m4 (it's part of a workaround for problems with an
obscure platform's "uname" command) and dates back as far as I could
conveniently examine using CVS.

Donal.

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