automake: SYS0003

[dmik]

When trying to autoconf pango with our latest automake RPM (1.14.1), I get the following after issuing autoreconf -fvi:

autoreconf: failed to run automake: SYS0003=0x3: The system cannot find the path specified

As a result, some of the Makefile.am files are not processed (no Makefile.in is generated).

[dmik]

Diving in automake/autoconf waters shows that this error comes from the $! Perl variable which keeps the last LIBC error (e.g. the value of strerror(errno)). Analyzing the autoreconf output shows that automake actually fails with this error:

docs/Makefile.am:161: error: ENABLE_GTK_DOC does not appear in AM_CONDITIONAL

and the $! value is either random (from some unrelated LIBC call that happens after the above error condition) or is a bug in the OS/2 perl implementation. To my taste, the former is more likely. If so, this is then a problem in autoconf logic (Autom4te/FileUtils.pm, handle_exec_errors, to be exact) which should perhaps not rely on $1 if $? is not zero as there are good chances it's unrelated. Anyway, I have too little knowledge ATM to make the final decision so I will postpone it for a while, given that if I fix the original error (ENABLE_GTK_DOC thingy, see r1268), this problem goes away.

[Silvan Scherrer]

yes this is a nasty automake error. When it can't create something it always spits this error. I had ton's of those until I fixed all binutils problems.