Re: [GNU Autoconf 2.70] testsuite: 318 319 391 392 402 403 404 405 414 416 447 472 486 507 508 510 512 513 517 519 521 523 531 533 534 535 536 537 538 541 542 543 544 545 546 547 548 549 552 554 556 558 562 565 569 571 573 574 577 578 579 580 582 583 584

[Zack Weinberg]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 2:48 PM Oppe, Thomas C ERDC-RDE-ITL-MS
Contractor <Thomas.C.Oppe@erdc.dren.mil> wrote:
>
> I tested Autoconf 2.70 on an IBM Power 9 system named "Scout" at ARL DSRC 
> [and there were many failures]
...
> Please ignore this e-mail.  The "gcc/7.3.0" compiler is broken on Scout, and 
> the broken compiler was resulting in these errors.

We appreciate the report anyway.

The test suite is supposed to cope with the *absence* of C and/or C++
compilers, and with compilers that don't work at all, but the problem
I saw in the testsuite.log you sent us—<sys/stat.h> being unusable in
C++ only—is not feasible for us to distinguish from an autoconf bug
from within the test suite.  Older versions of Autoconf did not
exercise the C++ compiler nearly as much in their test suites, which
is why you may not have seen a problem before.  I will consider
whether there is something I could add to the release notes to warn
people about test failures due to broken compilers.

zw