Behavior change from warning to error in m4 between 1.4.5 and 1.4.13 ?

[Jesse Mundis]

Hi there.

 

I’m porting a system from Centos 5 to Centos 6, and have observed a difference in m4 behavior.  I’d like to know if this change was intentional and if there is a way (short of installing the older version) to get the old behavior.  I’ve read through the changelog entries, but haven’t found anything.

 

m4 is being used to turn a sendmail.mc file in to a sendmail.cf file.  The OSTYPE line refers to “linux-gnu” but there is no /usr/share/sendmail-cf/ostype/linux-gnu.m4 file in this case, which generates a “no such file or directory” warning.  In version 1.4.5 (Centos 5) this causes the same warning, but m4 still returns a return code of 0 and successfully completes.  In version 1.4.13 (Centos 6) m4 returns a return code of 1, even though it still can generate the file.

 

It *appears* like the –E option has become an undocumented default behavior, turning warnings into, effectively, errors.  Is this correct?  Is there a way to revert this behavior?

 

In my particular case, I could use the “linux.m4” or “gnu.m4” files present on the system or create a new linux-gnu.m4 file as a work-around, however that would only fix this one case.  The code could be installed on other systems with different missing m4 files, and I’d like to make *any* missing “ostype/*file.m4” be a non-error-code-setting warning again, as it was in version 1.4.5.

 

Any insight into how/why this change happened, and a way to work around it to get the old behavior would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

 

Jesse