Re: Current trunk fails to build on MS-Windows

[Gavin Smith]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 3:34 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 11:26:52 +0000
>> From: Gavin Smith <address@hidden>
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, address@hidden, address@hidden
>>
>> >     Except that any modification will bust us.  This is still Free
>> >     Software, right?
>> >
>>
>> A similar problem would be an update to configure.ac that couldn't be
>> processed with older versions of autoconf. We can't check for versions
>> of autoconf in the configure script, for example.
>
> Then perhaps always check and display a non-fatal warning, to the
> effect that "Gawk >= 4.0 not found; regenerating texindex.awk will be
> impossible", or some such.  I've seen several packages do that.
>

I don't know. I thought of a similar situation that may shed light.
Suppose there were Info files in a distribution that needed to be
regenerated with makeinfo from certain versions from GNU Texinfo.
Should the configure script check for this? This is similar to the
gawk situtation, in that end users can still use the files
(documentation files, or interpreted program).

It's not like checking for features in compilers, because we don't
distribute the compiled output, so users would need a configure check
to be able to use the program.

Changes to the build system are different as well, because it's absurd
for the build system to be checking if it itself can be built.

On the subject of tracking generated files like texindex.awk (or
Makefile.in, for example) in the version-control repository, it is an
extra burden on anyone committing changes to the source files to
remember to commit the generated files.

If we were to check for gawk in the configure script, would this be a
check on the output of "gawk --version"? It's often said that it's
better to check for the features one needs instead of a particular
version of a particular program. There might not be other Gawk/Awk
implementations than GNU Gawk that have the needed features, though.
(Same for a check on "makeinfo --version" for checks on the version of
Texinfo.)