autotools syntax error with ax_check_compile_flag

Question

I am using autotools for building my C++ application. In my configure.ac I have the following line:

AX_CHECK_COMPILE_FLAG([-Wall], [CPPFLAGS         


        

Answer 1

autoreconf isn't magic (though I encounter package maintainers who obviously believe this). When you ran autoreconf, it failed to find the AX_CHECK_COMPILE_FLAG macro, and produced a corrupt configure script. Usually that produces an error/diagnostic message at the same time.

'AX_CHECK_COMPILE_FLAG` comes from the autoconf archive project, and Debian has a package which provides this, named autoconf-archive. Likely, you forgot to install it:

sudo apt-get install autoconf-archive