GOBJECT_INTROSPECTION_CHECK syntax error on configure

Question

On "./configure" of an open source project I get:

user agent OS = Linux
./configure: line 13957: syntax error near unexpected token 0.9.3'
./configure: line 13957: GOBJECT_INTROSPECTION_CHECK(0.9.3)'
make: *** [config.status] Error 2

Ubuntu 12.04 package "gobject-introspection" and "libgirepository1.0-dev" are present. Removing the GOBJECT_INTROSPECTION_CHECK line allows configure to complete, but the project fails a dependency later.

How can I get past this configure step cleanly? Googling for this issue shows bugs filed against numerous OS projects for this same blocking issue, but the usual answer is "install gobject-introspection".

Answer 1

As the OP discovered on his own he had to install the gobject-introspection package to get the m4 macros that were being used.

The error message has the raw macro in it, as configure scripts are generated from configure.in/configure.ac files via m4/etc the fact that the raw macro is in the output file indicates that the macro did not get translated at generation time.

The gobject-introspection m4 files were apparently installed after autogen.sh (or equivalent) was run to generate the configure script. Re-running the autogen.sh script should regenerate the configure script and run the macro correctly.