Suggestion for improving an error message

Reuben Thomas via Bug reports for autoconf <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.sysutils.autoconf.bugs
Message-ID <CAOnWdohvHyJHBguqVsTkzFppV6Z+aieiTRMk9vwtH68TT5ihqQ@mail.gmail.com>
Last night I had the baffling error "possibly undefined macro: AC_MSG_WARN".
Surely "impossibly undefined macro"!

Anyway, I was led to the following excellent analysis of the problem:
https://ae1020.github.io/undefined-macro-pkg-config/

In my case, I was briefly baffled even further, as I *had* installed
pkg-config. But after a little thought I realised that my case was the
"opposite": I had failed to install a required autoconf-archive macro in my
project. Problem solved!

I wonder though if it might be possible to adopt the simplest suggestion of
the article I cite above, and improve the error message to something like
the following (lightly edited from the blog post to conform better to what
I take for autoconf house style):

configure.ac:34: error: unexpanded AC_XXX macro: AC_MSG_ERROR
    A token that looks like an autoconf macro was left unexpanded in the output.
    It may be undefined, or passed by `quote' to another macro that should
    have invoked it but isn't installed to do so. If this token and others
    are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
    See the Autoconf documentation.configure.ac:143: error: unexpanded
AC_XXX macro: AC_DEFINE
autoreconf: /usr/bin/autoconf failed with exit status: 1

Quite wordy, but might help more users get straight to the real problem!

-- 
https://rrt.sc3d.org
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.