Subject: Re: bug#49901: Bug in build c-ares [too many loops]

From: Brad House <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2021 13:20:39 -0400

On 8/17/21 1:06 PM, Nick Bowler wrote:
> On 2021-08-17, Brad House via Bug reports for Automake
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> I'm one of the maintainers of the c-ares project at
>> https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares and have had a couple of users report
>> this issue.
> I took a quick glance and I found this:
>
>    https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/blob/main/m4/zz60-xc-ovr.m4
>
> which is redefining autoconf-supplied macros (AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR) and
> is almost certainly the cause of your problem.  I suggest simply not
> doing that, and aclocal will probably work as expected.  Just delete
> this file and delete the XC_OVR_ZZ60 line from configure.ac and I
> expect your aclocal failure will go away.
<snip>
> If you really need something like this to support bootstrapping with
> Autoconf 2.57 (which is getting close to 20 years old now!), I suggest
> you find another solution that doesn't involve redefining the internals
> on newer Autoconf versions.
>

Thanks for taking a glance at this, unfortunately it didn't correct the 
issue:

bhouse:c-ares-master bhouse$ autoreconf -fiv
autoreconf: export WARNINGS=
autoreconf: Entering directory '.'
autoreconf: configure.ac: not using Gettext
autoreconf: running: aclocal --force -I m4 --install
aclocal: installing 'm4/ax_ac_append_to_file.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ax_ac_append_to_file.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/ax_ac_print_to_file.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ax_ac_print_to_file.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/ax_add_am_macro_static.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ax_add_am_macro_static.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/ax_am_macros_static.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ax_am_macros_static.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/ax_check_gnu_make.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ax_check_gnu_make.m4'
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/ax_code_coverage.m4' with 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ax_code_coverage.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/ax_cxx_compile_stdcxx.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ax_cxx_compile_stdcxx.m4'
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/ax_cxx_compile_stdcxx_11.m4' with 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ax_cxx_compile_stdcxx_11.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/ax_file_escapes.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ax_file_escapes.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/libtool.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/libtool.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/ltoptions.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ltoptions.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/ltsugar.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ltsugar.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/ltversion.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ltversion.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/lt~obsolete.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/lt~obsolete.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/ax_require_defined.m4' from 
'/usr/local/share/aclocal/ax_require_defined.m4'
aclocal: error: too many loops
aclocal: Please contact <[email-masked]>.
  at 
/usr/local/Cellar/automake/1.16.4/share/automake-1.16/Automake/Channels.pm 
line 655.
     Automake::Channels::msg("automake", "", "too many loops") called at 
/usr/local/Cellar/automake/1.16.4/share/automake-1.16/Automake/ChannelDefs.pm 
line 226
     Automake::ChannelDefs::prog_error("too many loops") called at 
/usr/local/bin/aclocal line 1187
autoreconf: error: aclocal failed with exit status: 255