Missing m4 forcing CLT reinstallation loop

[Larry Stone]

This seems like an Xcode issue more than MacPorts but since MacPorts is why I have Xcode and its command line tools installed, I’ll ask here.

I upgraded to Sonoma about three weeks ago. All went well including following the MacPorts instructions for major MacOS upgrades. All was working fine. At the time, Xcode and CLT was version 15.1 but both have been upgraded to 15.3 since then.

Today, for the first time since upgrading to Sonoma, I ran the MacPorts update sequence starting with port selfudpate. One of the packages needing updating was Postfix which requires local building. The upgrade script errored and an error box popped up saying "the m4 command requires the command line developer tools.” Uh, they’re installed. Thinking maybe something had changed, I let it rerun the CLT installation but per System Information, the version was the same. Tried to upgrade Postfix again and the same thing.

Looking in the CLT directory, I saw usr/bin/gm4 but not m4. A search suggested that gm4 is just m4 with a different name (maybe GNU m4) and to link m4 to gm4. I did and Postfix upgraded OK.

So what happened? Built OK three weeks ago with CLT 15.1 but failed today with CLT 15.3. Was m4 in 15.1 but is now missing? (Normally, I’d just go to the Time Machine disk to take a look but I had to reinitialize it just a few days ago due to an error trying to expand the Time Machine partition on the disk). Am I OK linking m4 to gm4?

-- 
Larry Stone
lstone19 at stonejongleux.com