Autotools

Diagnosing Problems

One of the most significant stumbling blocks that people run into at this point is not so much a lack of understanding of how these macros work but a lack of attention to detail. There are several places where things can go wrong when writing even a simple macro like this. For example, you might have any of the following problems:

• Space between a macro name and the opening parenthesis

• Unbalanced brackets or parentheses

• The wrong number of parameters

• A misspelled macro name

• Incorrectly quoted arguments to a macro

• A missing comma in a macro's parameter list

M4 is rather unforgiving of such mistakes. Worse, its error messages can be even more cryptic than those of make.^[140] If you get strange errors and you think your macro should be ...