On 2021-08-17, Brad House via Bug reports for Automake <bug-automake@gnu.org> wrote: > I'm one of the maintainers of the c-ares project at > https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares and have had a couple of users report > this issue.
I took a quick glance and I found this: https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/blob/main/m4/zz60-xc-ovr.m4 which is redefining autoconf-supplied macros (AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR) and is almost certainly the cause of your problem. I suggest simply not doing that, and aclocal will probably work as expected. Just delete this file and delete the XC_OVR_ZZ60 line from configure.ac and I expect your aclocal failure will go away. The likely reason why the issue is intermittent is because aclocal will not see this definition on its first pass of a clean workspace, and the "too many loops" error happens because the state changes in the middle of the aclocal run, once the redefinition is incorporated into aclocal.m4 (and things might even appear to work again after that point, until you delete aclocal.m4 and go again). If you really need something like this to support bootstrapping with Autoconf 2.57 (which is getting close to 20 years old now!), I suggest you find another solution that doesn't involve redefining the internals on newer Autoconf versions. Cheers, Nick
