arning: .PHONY was already defined in condition TRUE, which includes condition AUTOCONF_CODE_COVER

[kgold2]

Ubuntu 16 xenial, x86

When following the instructions to get and install this as a work around, http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/autoconf-archive/autoconf-archive-2019.01.06.tar.xz, bootstrap now says

./bootstrap
aminclude_static.am:126: warning: .PHONY was already defined in condition TRUE, which includes condition AUTOCONF_CODE_COVERAGE_2019_01_06 ...
Makefile.am:175: 'aminclude_static.am' included from here
Makefile.am:6: ... '.PHONY' previously defined here
Makefile.am:182: warning: AM_DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS multiply defined in condition AUTOCONF_CODE_COVERAGE_2019_01_06 and CODE_COVERAGE_ENABLED ...
aminclude_static.am:100: ... 'AM_DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS' previously defined here
Makefile.am:175: 'aminclude_static.am' included from here

[williamcroberts]

This is a harmless warning generated by working around a broken version of autoconf-archive. I wonder if we can just drop the workaround and say you need to have 2021-02-19. But Ubuntu 20.04 doesn't even have it, so it might be premature.

[kgold2]

Thanks for the quick response. The errors looked serious.

This issue seem like it's recurring. Could you ship the correct files in m4 directly?

[williamcroberts]

Thanks for the quick response. The errors looked serious.

It says, "warning", not "error". Although I can see why the level of concern. We might want to bolster the install docs to say these warnings are harmless.

This issue seem like it's recurring. Could you ship the correct files in m4 directly?

The issue isn't recurring, If we just drop support for the outdated autoconf-archive versions, this would go away assuming something in autoconf-archive doesn't regress. But then when we ship the autoconf-archive files, then we need to make sure they stay up to date, just one more task to do. Especially when you consider the fixes around the various macros, I don't want to have to track and deal with that when package maintainers provide it.

[tstruk]

As explained in tpm2-software/tpm2-tss#2020. This is because the code coverage macros from the autoconf-archive changed in a way that breaks backward compatibility and our workaround to make it work with both old and new version of aminclude_static.am can cause it to emit strange warnings.