Re: autoconf 2.52

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "Steven" == Steven G Johnson <address@hidden> writes:

Steven> The problem here seems to be that your f77 script does not
Steven> support any known "verbose" flag to get it to say what
Steven> libraries it is linking with, so autoconf cannot detect them.
Steven> (There is usually a libf2c or something that is required if
Steven> you want to link to any code using Fortran intrinsic
Steven> functions, etcetera.)  We have two options here:

Steven> 1) If there is some special verbose flag that your f77 script
Steven> uses, we can easily support it.  Currently, we check: -v
Steven> -verbose --verbose -V -\#\#\#

Steven> 2) We can try to manually detect this f77-f2c script and
Steven> manually set the right FLIBS (Fortran libraries).  Ugh.

Steven> 3) We can screw it and say that linking C and Fortran code
Steven> using this script is not supported automatically.  The user
Steven> has to specify the FLIBS environment variable explicitly to
Steven> get the right Fortran libs.

But what should be the policy wrt failure?  Does it make sense to keep
just a warning?  Shouldn't it be an error?

In fact, since it means this is a possible failure, I'm just willing
to know _how_ it can fail so that I can adjust the test suite to
correctly detect this is a possible failure.