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Reporting Messages

When macros statically diagnose abnormal situations, benign or fatal, they should report them using these macros. For dynamic issues, i.e., when configure is run, see Printing Messages.

AC_DIAGNOSE (category, message)

Macro

Report message as a warning (or as an error if requested by the user) if it falls into the category. You are encouraged to use standard categories, which currently include: all messages that don't fall into one of the following category. Use of an empty category is equivalent. cross related to cross compilation issues. obsolete use of an obsolete construct. syntax dubious syntactic constructs, incorrectly ordered macro calls.

AC_WARNING (message)

Macro

Equivalent to AC_DIAGNOSE([syntax], message), but you are strongly encouraged to use a finer grained category.

AC_FATAL (message)

Macro

Report a severe error message, and have autoconf die.

When the user runs autoconf -W error, warnings from AC_DIAGNOSE and AC_WARNING are reported as error, see autoconf Invocation.