possibly undefined macro AC MSG ERROR

Question

I have the following in configure ac   AC CHECK PROGS MAKE  MAKE make gmake error  if test  x MAKE     xerror   then   AC MSG ERROR  cannot find a make command   fi   This has been in our project for a long time  but in some set ups  I get this error   configure ac 45  error  possibly undefined macro  AC MSG ERROR   If this token and others are legitimate  please use m4 pattern allow    See the Autoconf documentation    The lines that were recently added above this   AC CONFIG MACRO DIR  m4   LT INIT   Can anyone explain what causes this error and how to track down the problem    EDIT  Adding details about the differences   Box that works    uname -a Linux host1 2 6 38-13-generic  53-Ubuntu SMP Mon Nov 28 19 33 45 UTC 2011 x86 64 x86 64 x86 64 GNU Linux  automake  1 11 1 autoconf  2 67 m4  1 4 14 libtoolize  2 2 6b   Box that doesn t work   Linux host2 2 6 32-35-generic-pae  78-Ubuntu SMP Tue Oct 11 17 01 12 UTC 2011 i686 GNU Linux  automake  1 11 1 autoconf  2 65 m4  1 4 13 libtoolize  2 2 6b   NEW EDIT  only 32 bit machines experience this difficulty   UPDATED I am able to reproduce the problem on a CentOS machine with autoconf 2 67  automake 1 11 1  libtool 2 2 6b  and m4 1 4 14  Is this just a bug with 32-bit machines

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My issue is resolved after I install pkg-config on Mac  brew install pkg-config

User · Answer

Are you setting up a local  m4  directory  e g     gt  aclocal -I m4 --install  Some packages come with an autogen sh or initgen sh shell script to run glibtoolize  autoheader  autoconf  automake  Here s an autogen sh script I use       bin sh  case  uname  in Darwin   glibtoolize --copy         libtoolize --copy    esac  autoheader aclocal -I m4 --install autoconf  automake --foreign --add-missing --force-missing --copy   EDIT  You may need to add ACLOCAL AMFLAGS   -I m4 to the top-level Makefile am

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Using MacOS X   sudo port install pkgconfig   was the solution

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This happened to me when I forgot a   in the arguments for a locally defined macro   Spent hours trying to figure it out  barely acquainted with autotools      AC CHECK MACRO  Foo      AC LOCAL DO           should have been  AC CHECK MACRO  Foo           lt -- Notice comma  doh      AC LOCAL DO           Seems like it should have given me an error or such  but I suppose being a macro processor it can only do what its told

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For Debian   Required packages are  m4 automake pkg-config libtool

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The error is generated by autom4te   If things are set up correctly  the portion of the code that generates that error should never see  AC MSG ERROR   because it should have been expanded by m4 before that point   You say the error only happens  in some setups    I would suggest that in those setups  your autoconf installation is fubar   Possibly you have an incompatible version of m4 installed

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I had this problem with my own configure ac  but in this case  and for the benefit of anyone here from Google  it was because I had accidentally quoted the AC MSG ERROR so it was being treated as a string   AX BOOST BASE  1 42        AC MSG ERROR  Could not find Boost       Once I removed the square brackets around the AC MSG ERROR macro  it worked   AX BOOST BASE  1 42       AC MSG ERROR  Could not find Boost      Those comments saying you should install pkg-config or some package are missing the point   The AC MSG ERROR is supposed to work and give you a helpful message like  You need to install package XYZ   but because of some problem  the AC MSG ERROR doesn t work   Installing package XYZ will certainly make the error go away  but only because once the package is there  there is no longer any need to print an error message   So installing pkg-config or a particular package just bypasses the problem  it doesn t actually fix it

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I had similar issues when trying to build amtk and utthpmock with jhbuild   I needed to install the most recent version of autoconf-archive  Instructions are at https   github com autoconf-archive autoconf-archive blob master README-maint  I did an additional sudo make install at the end   The last step was to update my ACLOCAL PATH   echo  export ACLOCAL PATH  ACLOCAL PATH  usr local share aclocal   gt  gt     bashrc   After a source    bashrc  all the macros were finally found and the builds succeeded

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i also had similar problem   my solution is to   apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev    i had libcurl allready installed   worked for me at least

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I had the same problem on Ubuntu  error  possibly undefined macro  AC MSG ERROR  but the answers above didn t work for me  I found the solution here  That did the trick      LANG C LC CTYPE C   autogen sh

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I solved this by yum install libtool

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There are two possible reasons for that problem    did not install aclocal  solution install libtool     For ubuntu  sudo apt-get install libtool For centos  sudo yum install libtool  the path to LIBTOOL m4 is error  solution     use aclocal --print-ac-dir to check current path to aclocal  It s usually should be   usr share aclocal  or   usr share aclocal   Then check if there are   m4 files   If not  cp corresponding   m4 files to this path   Maybe cp  usr share aclocal   m4  usr local share aclocal  or cp  usr local share aclocal   m4  usr share aclocal      Hope it helps

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It is recommended to use autoreconf -fi instead of manually calling aclocal autoconf automake   and whatever else to properly populate aclocal m4 and so on   Adding ACLOCAL AMFLAGS   -I m4  to the toplevel Makefile am  and AC CONFIG MACRO DIR  m4   is currently still optional if you do not use any own m4 files  but of course  doing it will silence the proocess

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I have experienced this same problem under CentOS 7  In may case  the problem went off after installation of libcurl-devel  libcurl was already installed on this machine

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I had this same issue and found that pkg-config package was missing   After installing the package  everything generated correctly

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I had the same problem with the Macports port  openocd   locally modified the Portfile to use the git repository  on a freshly installed machine   The permanent fix is easy  define a dependency to pkgconfig in the Portfile      depends lib-append  port pkgconfig

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I had the same problem on RHEL7 5 with otto-de libvmod-uuid  It was fixed by installing  autoconf-archive  packages

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I just lost a few hours on this one  My conclusion    Depending on version and whatever other local conditions  autoconf will spit out the message about AC MSG ERROR undefined when it encounters ANY undefined macro  The AC MSG ERROR is a red herring  The causes for an undefined macro can be    A typo in a macro name in the file  or a local macro which has not been shipped with the tarball Missing a package which would have come with a set of autoconf macros  one of which is used in the file  pkg-config is often the missing one  because of  e g  PKG CHECK MODULES   but this could be any other package supplying a needed but absent macro  The vicious thing of course  is that this happens before the still not existing configure script could check for the missing package

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On Mac OS X el captain with brew  try  brew install pkgconfig    This worked for me

[autotools] possibly undefined macro: AC_MSG_ERROR

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