Bug in AX_CHECK_POSIX_REGCOMP in current Autoconf Archive
Jonathan Kamens <[email protected]> Wed, 22 Aug 2018 14:09:34 -0400
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.sysutils.autoconf.archive-maintainers |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
The current AX_CHECK_POSIX_REGCOMP macro in Autoconf Archive calls this: return regcomp( &re, "|no.*", flags ); }]])],[ax_cv_posix_regcomp=yes],[ax_cv_posix_regcomp=no],[ax_cv_posix_regcomp=no] But according to the regex(7) man page on Linux, branches in a POSIX regex are required to be non-empty, so the regular expression "|no.*" appears to be invalid since it conatins an empty branch. And indeed, this macro fails on NetBSD, with regcomp returning 14, which is the error code REG_EMPTY. This is such a specific regex that I find it hard to believe that it's just a coincidence that the test it's doing contains an empty branch. Unfortunately, the Git history doesn't go back far enough to determine why this is the way it is. I don't suppose you have any idea? Interestingly, it doesn't fail on Linux. Thanks, Jonathan Kamens