I've tracked down the problem with the failure of the 108.format test
in m4-1.4.7 (and earlier versions back to m4-1.4.5).
The DEC Alpha OSF/1 4.0 system is the ONLY one in our test lab of
about 25 different Unix platforms that lacks snprintf() in -lc.
A fair number of packages expect to have that function, so several
years ago, I did a Web search and found this distribution:
http://www.ijs.si/software/snprintf/snprintf_2.2.tar.gz
I installed it in two libraries, -lsnprintf (for cc) and -lgccsnprintf
(for gcc), and have used it since.
The m4 tests show that it has a problem: floating-point formats are
not supported, sigh... Here's the output of a test program that uses
%.0f, %.1f, %.2f, %.3f, and %.4f formats:
% ./a.out
sprintf(): 56790
snprintf(): f
sprintf(): 56790.0
snprintf(): f
sprintf(): 56789.99
snprintf(): f
sprintf(): 56789.988
snprintf(): f
sprintf(): 56789.9876
snprintf(): f
We keep a directory of the output of nm for all installed libraries,
and I've just scanned it. I found several that have snprintf, but
tests with most showed they have the same behavior, very likely
because they were linked with the snprintf_2.2 library code.
However, I finally found one library with its own snprintf():
/usr/local/lib/sasl2/libplain.so. Linking the test program with that
library produces almost correct output:
./a.out
sprintf(): 56790
snprintf(): 56790.0 <-- WRONG
sprintf(): 56790.0
snprintf(): 56790.0
sprintf(): 56789.99
snprintf(): 56789.99
sprintf(): 56789.988
snprintf(): 56789.988
sprintf(): 56789.9876
snprintf(): 56789.9876
That library comes from the Cyrus SASL package:
ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/cyrus-mail/
I then created a new configuration file for builds on the DEC Alpha
OSF/1 system to use -lplain instead of -lgccsnprintf or -lsnprintf,
and ran a build. Unfortunately, m4-1.4.7 now fails two tests:
Failed checks were:
./029.defn:err ./108.format:out
Correct output of the 108.format test is
The string "The brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" uses 38 characters
56790
300
but m4 with -lplain produces
The string "The brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" uses 38 characters
56790.0
11
It looks like I have to go looking again for a better free
implementation of snprintf(), sigh...
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