Can't produce a FreeBSD ./configure with GNU autoreconf 2.72

[dereckson]

I've built successfully with an autoreconf-configure-make roll under a FreeBSD 14.1 machine.

When I wanted to reproduce that build in a clean, fresh environment, on the same machine, the autoreconf produced a different ./configure - diff is available at https://reviews.freebsd.org/P650

With the green one, ./configure fails with ./configure: 5014: Syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")").
The same green ./configure is generated regardless bash is installed or not, so not sure what triggers a different output.

Full autoreconf and ./configure output are available at https://windriver.nasqueron.org/poudriere/base14-dereckson_dev/2024-10-05_12h25m58s/logs/errors/roll-2.6.1.log

This is related to bash completion support.

[dereckson]

Gotcha the difference, pkg-config wasn't installed on the fresh machine and so, the pkg-config silently fails into an empty value.

Solution is to require pkg-config as build dependency.

[matteocorti]

I am not really convinced that the presence of pkg-config should be checked by roll. I use autoreconf to generate all the files. Although pkg-config is not usually necessary it seems that in your case autoreconf assumes its presence.

I only use pkg-config in the SPEC file to generate RPMs (but these should not be relevant on FreeBSD).

[dereckson]

autoreconf can apparently cope with the presence or absence of pkg-config

But you make an explicit call to pkg-config here:

https://github.com/matteocorti/roll/blob/master/configure.ac#L44

Reference introduced in a6d9dd3

[matteocorti]

Can you check with the latest commit?