diff mbox

configure check for flex

Message ID 5308FD5C.40200@gnu.org
State New
Headers show

Commit Message

Bruce Korb Feb. 22, 2014, 7:41 p.m. UTC 
On 01/27/14 18:20, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:
>>> You'd need some additional conditions.  There might be the
>>> additional issue that any "lex" is expected to work too, not
>>> just "flex".
>>
>> It isn't committed 'cuz nobody said, "Okay."
>> I do wish either someone would say, "Okay." or come up with something
>> that works.
>> I went to the effort to figure out where things got off the rails and
>> did something that
>> worked for me.  Just saying, "That won't work" without a workable alternative
>> is a bit irritating.
>
> There are surely plenty of opportunities around for
> irritatation! :)  Dropped patches surely; I thought I was
> helpful there.  Ungraceful errors from easily identifiable
> common gotchas definitely, so what you're trying to achieve is
> IMHO desirable.  Patches hacking in something that just happened
> to work for someone too; I tried to stop that from happening.

I spend my programming life either hacking at a startup or maintaining
a few GNU tools I'm responsible for (e.g. "fixincludes").  This is
outside of that realm, so I'm trying to produce enough of a patch
that someone who knows how better than I do can finish it.

I put my patch into the top level configure.ac file, not the
gcc or libcpp ones.  I suppose I could hack out the logic for
setting is_release from those files, but really the crucial part
is just having an intelligible error message that leads someone
with a removed "flex" tool to a resolution of the issue.
Someday maybe important tools won't disappear on you when
you update your distribution, but barring that, the silent
requirement for flex combined with an uninformative error
message yields a booby trap.  I hate booby traps.    :)

Cheers - Bruce



$ svn diff configure.ac

Comments

Bruce Korb Feb. 22, 2014, 8:46 p.m. UTC | #1 
In retrospect, it occurs to me that a "am-i-ready-to-build.sh" script
in the contrib directory might be useful, too.
diff mbox

Patch

Index: configure.ac
===================================================================
--- configure.ac        (revision 208044)
+++ configure.ac        (working copy)
@@ -1319,10 +1319,17 @@ 
  # Used for setting $lt_cv_objdir
  _LT_CHECK_OBJDIR

-# Check for GMP, MPFR and MPC
+# Check for flex, GMP, MPFR and MPC
+[for p in flex
+do
+  c=`command -v $p`
+  test -x "$c" || \
+    ]AC_MSG_ERROR([the $c command is required to build GCC])[
+done
+
  gmplibs="-lmpc -lmpfr -lgmp"
  gmpinc=
-have_gmp=no
+have_gmp=no]

  # Specify a location for mpc
  # check for this first so it ends up on the link line before mpfr.