This problem was discovered when trying to bootstrap Prefix Portage on SUSE Enterprise Server 9.3, following the October 29, 2007 version of http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/bootstrap-linux.xml. In brief, the problem is that emerging m4 fails if attempted right after emerging bash. A workaround is to defer emerging m4 until libtool has been emerged. After that it is also necessary to re-emerge some packages that possibly require m4 of version not older than 1.4.10. I have not investigated exactly which packages that have to be re-emerged; since it does not take long I simply re-emerge all autoconfand automake packages, plus texinfo and libtool. Having done so the process is in fine shape for the next step (coreutils). Artifacts will be enclosed.
Created attachment 134615 [details] script used to demonstrate the problem script used to demonstrate the problem
Created attachment 134616 [details] console output that demonstrates the problem console output that demonstrates the problem
Created attachment 134618 [details] build log of m4 build log of m4
Created attachment 134620 [details] script that demonstrates workaround script that demonstrates workaround
Not sure if this is of interest, but typing `m4 --version' on the SUSE server, before attempting bootstrap, yields this response: GNU m4 1.4o
The workaround described before is overkill. It appears that it is sufficient to insert these three lines before emerging m4: emerge --oneshot --nodeps "=autoconf-2.6*" emerge --oneshot --nodeps "autoconf-wrapper" emerge --oneshot --nodeps texinfo
The workaround described in this bug report also works on another oldish platform: "Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 3 (Taroon Update 5)". A straightforward attempt to bootstrap, following the usual webpage (<http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/bootstrap-linux.xml>, October 29, 2007), ends with a failure when the m4 package is to be emerged for the first time. See attachment "emerge-m4-fails-on-RHEL-3.txt". Applying the workaround gets me past m4 and well into the first `emerge -e system'.
Created attachment 136529 [details] final lines of console output
I committed this as revision 1.3. I hope it works for all linuxes sort of... I felt like it greatly cleaned bits up though. Thanks!
