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Autoconf is primarily a collection of M4 macros that are used to permute your
supplied text into the desired result. This alleviates the need for you to
type in all the repetitive text necessary for doing configure tests and it
also makes it possible to fix bugs and change implementation without going
back and fixing all the scripts that use the algorithms.
This page describes the derivation of the problem. I found it very helpful
to know what the issues were that led to the current situation.
The issue with quoting evolved mostly as follows:
- To work, M4 needs to be able to determine where the start and end of
text are for each of its macro arguments. It does this by collecting text
between the "(", "," and ")" characters.
Sometimes, however, you need these characters as part of the macro
argument string. Therefore, M4 adds the notion of quoting a string. In
vanilla M4, you can quote a string by surrounding the text with "`"
and "'" characters. In order to include these characters, they must be quoted.
But since they are also the quote characters, they must be balanced within the
quoted string. You must make sure they are properly ordered and nested. M4
will keep track of the depth and preserve the nested quotation
characters. Autoconf has a problem with this. In programming, these two quoting
characters are used often and used for different purposes. Consequently, they
will rarely happen to match. M4 provides a feature that Autoconf takes
advantage of: changequote().
With that special built-in macro, you can change the quoting characters
to another pair of tokens that may, in fact, be several characters long.
Autoconf did not take advantage of that, it changed it
to "[" and "]" instead. That mostly works in the programming world. That is because
square brackets are generally used in pairs and so they behave as properly
nested quotes in Autoconf's m4 files. The problems are the "mostly
balanced" part, of course, and they will disappear on you if they are not
quoted when they are evaluated. Ick.
Autoconf's solution for this is ``quadrigraphs''. These are very
ugly four-character improbable sequences that get replaced in a final pass
through sed(1) to emit the configure program. The
reason Autoconf chose to do this instead of merely having users change quotes
around the macro arguments was because the macro arguments are allowed to and
encouraged to use Autoconf macros within them. If you change quotes around an
Autoconf macro, M4 will become confused because the macro was written on the
assumption that it knew what the current quoting phrases are (viz.,
"[" and "]").
As a consequence, you, the Autoconf macro developer should, in
general, do everything you can to write code that either does not
contain square brackets, or only contains them in balanced pairs.
If that is not possible for some circumstance, you may either:
- Replace the square bracket characters that cause the imbalance
with quadrigraphs. You should have AutoGen leave the text alone
because the quote phrases are now balanced again, or
Have AutoGen blindly replace all Autoconf-problematic characters with
quadrigraphs. Who cares if it's ugly. Don't look at it. Just beware,
quoted arguments to contained Autoconf macros will have those quoting
square brackets replaced, too. That is certain to confuse any
Autoconf macros that exist within arguments to other macros.
Well, that's pretty much it. You are now an expert on Autoconf's use of M4
quoting. Your final exam consists of creating and using an autoconf macro
yourself. To do this, you can:
- Use the conftest macro generation
page,
- Copy and use or modify a macro from the Autoconf macro archive, or
- Write an Autoconf macro directly.
Whichever, please let me () know if you found this page useful.
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