Clarify error messages for misuse of m4_warn and --help for -W.
m4_warn([category], [message]) passes its arguments directly to
Autom4te::Channels::msg. If the category argument is not a recognized
“channel”, that function will crash and emit a *Perl* stack trace,
which makes it look like there’s something wrong with autoconf or
autom4te, rather than something wrong with the script.
Making matters worse, in autoconf 2.69, the manual said you could
use “all” and the empty string as the first argument to m4_warn.
As far as I can tell, neither of those was ever a valid message
channel, and the manual was corrected in 2.70, but we still got
a bug report from someone who tried it.
This patch makes us issue a nice helpful user error, instead of a
confusing internal error, when Autom4te::Channels::msg is called with
a bogus channel argument. If the bogus channel is “all” or the empty
string, that error is demoted to a -Wobsolete warning. If it is one
of the other special tokens recognized by -W, we customize the error
message, since someone might’ve thought that “none” being acceptable
to -W meant it was also acceptable to m4_warn. The --help output for
autoconf, autoheader, autom4te, and autoreconf is also adjusted to
clarify that not all of the tokens recognized by -W count as
warning categories.
(Oddly enough, the lack of filtration at the autom4te level means
m4_warn([error], […]) actually does issue an error. There’s no other
way to get exactly that effect — m4_errprintn(…) and m4_fatal(…)
both do something a little different — so I I propose to leave that
alone for now and promote it to a proper, documented feature, probably
spelled m4_error(…), post-2.72.)
Channels.pm and ChannelDefs.pm are shared with Automake. I believe
there is nothing you can write in a Makefile.am that will cause
Automake::Channels::msg to be called with an arbitrary user-supplied
channel argument, so these changes should have no visible effect on
that side of the fence.
* lib/Autom4te/Channels.pm (msg): If the channel argument is invalid,
don’t crash; report the mistake and use the ‘syntax’ channel.
(report_bad_channel): New function for reporting invalid channels.
* lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm (usage): Clarify that the list of
warning categories is exhaustive, and that “all”, “none”,
“no-CATEGORY”, and “error” are not warning categories.