Subject: bug#75605: aclocal: error: too many loops

From: Santiago Vila <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:18:09 +0100

Hello.

I get the error in the Subject when I try to build the Debian alpine package
from source on a Debian unstable chroot.

Inside an unstable chroot with the build-depends already installed, these are the
steps to reproduce:

apt-get source alpine
cd alpine-2.26+dfsg
dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b

and this is what happens:

[...]
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/lib-ld.m4' with '/usr/share/aclocal/lib-ld.m4'
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/lib-link.m4' with '/usr/share/aclocal/lib-link.m4'
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/lib-prefix.m4' with '/usr/share/aclocal/lib-prefix.m4'
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/libtool.m4' with '/usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4'
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/ltoptions.m4' with '/usr/share/aclocal/ltoptions.m4'
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/ltversion.m4' with '/usr/share/aclocal/ltversion.m4'
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/nls.m4' with '/usr/share/aclocal/nls.m4'
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/po.m4' with '/usr/share/aclocal/po.m4'
aclocal: overwriting 'm4/progtest.m4' with '/usr/share/aclocal/progtest.m4'
aclocal: installing 'm4/intlmacosx.m4' from '/usr/share/aclocal/intlmacosx.m4'
aclocal: error: too many loops
aclocal: Please contact <[email-masked]>.
  at /usr/share/automake-1.16/Automake/Channels.pm line 655.
	Automake::Channels::msg("automake", "", "too many loops") called at /usr/share/automake-1.16/Automake/ChannelDefs.pm line 226
	Automake::ChannelDefs::prog_error("too many loops") called at /usr/bin/aclocal line 1187
autoreconf: error: aclocal failed with exit status: 255
dh_autoreconf: error: autoreconf -f -i returned exit code 1
make: *** [debian/rules:49: binary] Error 255
dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules binary subprocess returned exit status 2

Note that there may be more than one issue here, as the package still needs
to be fixed for make 4.4.x:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1089250

However, this error is new and it says "Please contact <[email-masked]>"
so I think you might be interested nevertheless.

Thanks.