On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:44 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>>   http://meyering.net/grep/grep-2.14.51-7a35.tar.xz
>
> That snapshot fails "make check" on Ubuntu 13.10 x86-64.
> However, when I generate a tarball from the same git source,
> "make check" works for me.
>
> I think I tracked this down to a discrepancy in the tools used
> to build this snapshot.  But it's getting late so I hope someone
> else can check this.
>
> The snapshot fails because the three tests multibyte-white-space,
> pcre-utf8, surrogate-pair all fail.  And they fail because
> "printf '\x40'" prints "\x40" rather than "@".
> And this happens because the tests are run with
> /bin/sh, not /bin/bash; on Ubuntu /bin/sh is Dash
> and Dash mishandles printf with '\x...'.  And this
> happens because './configure' decides to make SHELL
> /bin/sh rather than /bin/bash.  And I think *this*
> happens because 'configure' was built with Autoconf
> 2.69.112-f181 rather than Autoconf 2.69 (this is
> the Autoconf 2.69 shipped with Fedora 19).  The
> respective 'configure' scripts are pretty hairy,
> though, and I can't easily see why the meyering.net
> snapshot went awry.

Thanks for tracking that down.
I've adjusted the tests not to rely on printf-\xHH.  Here's the patch
I expect to push.
I want to write a replacement printf function (set up via init.sh and
that transforms \xHH to \OOO in the format string), but that will have
to wait until after the release.