I have a small open source program that builds with an autoconf configure script.

I ran configure I tried to compile with:

make CC="/opt/local/bin/i386-mingw32-g++"

That didn't work because the configure script found include files that were not available to the mingw system.

So then I tried:

./configure CC="/opt/local/bin/i386-mingw32-g++"

But that didn't work; the configure script gives me this error:

./configure: line 5209: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
./configure: line 5209: `      *_cv_*'

Because of this code:

# The following way of writing the cache mishandles newlines in values,                                               
# but we know of no workaround that is simple, portable, and efficient.                                               
# So, we kill variables containing newlines.                                                                          
# Ultrix sh set writes to stderr and can't be redirected directly,                                                    
# and sets the high bit in the cache file unless we assign to the vars.                                               
(
  for ac_var in `(set) 2>&1 | sed -n 's/^\(a-zA-Z_a-zA-Z0-9_*\)=.*/\1/p'`; do
    eval ac_val=\$$ac_var
    case $ac_val in #(                                                                                                
    *${as_nl}*)
      case $ac_var in #(                                                                                              
      *_cv_*
fi

Which is generated then the AC_OUTPUT is called.

Any thoughts? Is there a correct way to do this?