There’s a problem in the current CVS snapshot for the Nagios Plugins which caused me to waste a good few hours. I’m posting this so that Google can cache it and find it for anyone else in future.

When running ./configure, there’s an error:

./configure: line 38316: gl_CHECK_HEADER_locale_h: command not found

This turns out to be a problem with the snapshot generated on Sourceforge. If you run tools/setup, it comes back with these warnings:

configure.in:1685: warning: gl_CHECK_HEADER_locale_h is m4_require'd but is not m4_defun'd
configure.in:1685: gl_CHECK_HEADER_locale_h is required by...
m4/onceonly_2_57.m4:48: AC_CHECK_HEADERS_ONCE is expanded from...
m4/regex.m4:187: gl_PREREQ_REGEX is expanded from...
m4/regex.m4:177: gl_REGEX is expanded from...
configure.in:1685: gl_REGEX is required by...
m4/np_coreutils.m4:29: np_COREUTILS is expanded from...

So the gl_CHECK_HEADER_locale_h cannot be m4 expanded, and is left in the ./configure script as-is. Tracing this through, the locale.h is defined in regex.m4, one of the files from the coreutils project. Since I trust that project, I didn’t think it could be a problem with their files and I was trying to upgrade autoconf and automake to no avail.

The problem was m4. If you have m4 at version 1.4.1 (or below, I presume), you’ll get the above error. You need m4 at version 1.4.2 (or above).

So the snapshots should be restored to working properly again. And I can get on with fixing the next thing on the list…