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="$CPPFLAGS -Wall"])

which causes the following error when executing ./configure (after running autoreconf -i):

./configure: line 3825: syntax error near unexpected token `-Wall,'
./configure: line 3825: `AX_CHECK_COMPILE_FLAG(-Wall, CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -Wall")'

My system: Linux web 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.65-1+deb7u2 x86_64 GNU/Linux

On my Ubuntu machine it works well, why do I get this error?

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