Re: AC_PROG_CC not working

[Peter Eisentraut]

Pavel Roskin writes:

> > Peter> This feature is extremely useful, because the default list is
> > Peter> pretty useless for some platforms and packages.
> 
> Peter, it is extremely important that you give some real examples here.

One real example is PostgreSQL on AIX, where you need to use xlc instead
of whatever else configure might think.  (AC_PROG_CC_STDC is less than
ideal for related reasons.)  I still want to check for gcc first, though,
so I'd use AC_PROG_CC([gcc xlc cc]).  Then we have older versions of
BSD/OS, where you need to take "gcc2".  There are several more examples on
the C++ side, e.g., aCC on HP-UX, xlC on AIX.

"Fix the list" is not a good answer, because you might break programs that
actually needed some other (K&R?) compiler.

Of course the final solution is to implement support for C dialects, as I
have mumbled several times before around these parts (and it even made it
to the TODO list).  But this feature is a good stop-gap.

> > Again, something which is extremely important with configures is that
> > they must behave the same way.  Having different flavors of AC_PROG_CC
> > seems wrong to me because it means the installer can not depend on
> > some expected behavior.

Huh?  I have never seen two configure scripts that behaved the same way
unless they were from the same version of the same package.  The point of
a configure script, IMHO, is to set up a package for successful
compilation, not to "behave the same".  (Having the same user interface is
a whole different matter.)

-- 
Peter Eisentraut      address@hidden       http://yi.org/peter-e/