bug#11893: Regression in automake 1.12.1 on Mac OS X

[Max Horn]

Thanks to Stefano, most of the issues I was seeing with automake 1.12.2 on Mac 
OS X 10.7 are gone now. Thanks!

The issue reported below is the only one that is still open. Anybody get 
something on that?

Cheers,
Max

On 09.07.2012, at 19:04, Max Horn wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> I am currently looking into packaging automake 1.12.1 for Fink 
> <http://www.finkproject.org/> on Mac OS X 10.7. Doing that, several test 
> suite failures popped up, which I am now working through to resolve.
> 
> The first one is t/silentcxx-gcc.sh failing. Note that t/silentcxx.sh 
> incorrectly (!) succeeds.
> 
> There are two problems here:
> 
> 1) The C++ compiler from Sun Studio is named "CC". This caused t/silentcxx.sh 
> to fail, which was fixed with commit ad5d0be02dd42c200be2ffebb1e062e96a06f80c 
> in the autonconf git repository. The same fix also needs to be applied to 
> t/silentcxx-gcc.sh.
> 
> 2) But actually I am happy this was there, because otherwise I wouldn't have 
> detected this second, more serious bug: On Mac OS X, automake 1.12.1 
> incorrectly thinks the C++ compiler is named CC (when really it should be 
> clang++, c++ or g++). This is because (a( OS X by default uses a case 
> in-sensitive file system, and so "CC" is equivalent to "cc", and (b) the 
> automake 1.12.1 code for some reason duplicate some autoconf code for 
> detecting the C++ compiler, but changed this code, breaking it. To quote 
> automake's configure.ac:
> 
> <BEGIN QUOTE>
> # The list of C++ compilers here has been copied, pasted and edited
> # from 'lib/autoconf/c.m4:AC_PROG_CXX' in the Autoconf distribution.
> # Keep it in sync, or better again, find out a way to avoid this code
> # duplication.
> _AM_COMPILER_CAN_FAIL([AC_PROG_CXX(dnl
>  [aCC CC FCC KCC RCC xlC_r xlC c++ cxx cc++ gpp g++])],
>  [CXX=false; _AM_SKIP_COMP_TESTS([C++])])
> <END QUOTE>
> 
> But this is what my version of c.m4 contains:
> <BEGIN QUOTE>
>    AC_CHECK_TOOLS(CXX,
>                  [m4_default([$1],
>                              [g++ c++ gpp aCC CC cxx cc++ cl.exe FCC KCC RCC 
> xlC_r xlC])],
>                  g++)
> <END QUOTE>
> i.e. the order of the compilers has been changed, and this causes the 
> breakage above. 
> 
> I wonder whether this different order of compilers is intentional -- and why 
> this is duplicated in automake in the first place? The comment in 
> configure.ac just says that the list was duplicated, not *why*. It would be 
> nice if it could be extended to explain just that by somebody who knows :).
> 
> 
> Finally, out of curiosity: I was wondering why silentcxx-gcc.sh is there -- 
> and why there isn't a silentcxx-gcc3.sh ?
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Max
> 
> 
>