OSF1 limits.h

[Aharon Robbins]

Hi.  Juergen reported this problem with limits.h on OSF1.

He was testing gawk, which uses autoconf 2.57. I believe his remark
about 2.13 is irrelevant to the case, since he's not rebuilding configure.
configure was built using 2.57.

I looked at the Autoconf manual. The gawk configure.in has:

        AC_CHECK_HEADERS(fcntl.h limits.h locale.h libintl.h mcheck.h \
                netdb.h netinet/in.h  signum.h stdarg.h string.h \
                sys/param.h sys/socket.h sys/time.h unistd.h \
                termios.h stropts.h wchar.h wctype.h)

And it would seem to be this that is generating the warning. It
looks to me like this is just an OSF1 weirdness and there's
nothing else to do about it.

Since all I want to do is define HAVE_LIMITS_H, I don't see what
else I should be doing in gawk's configure.in.

Enlightenment welcome.

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins

> Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 09:34:53 +0100
> From: Juergen Kahrs <address@hidden>
> To: Aharon Robbins <address@hidden>
> Subject: [Fwd: Re: Report this to address@hidden
>
>   Hello,
>
> as you told me, I reported this problem to the bug-autoconf list.
> I don't understand what is going on during configuration, but
> it looks like it is a "bug" in the gawk-specific configuration:
>
> | I have autoconf version 2.13 and gcc version 2.8.1
> | running on a OSF1 alphaev56-dec-osf4.0d release V5.1 machine.
> | When configuring Aharon Robbins' pre-beta of gawk-3.1.1k,
> | I get these messages:
> | 
>
>
> | configure: WARNING: limits.h: present but cannot be compiled
> | configure: WARNING: limits.h: check for missing prerequisite headers?
> | configure: WARNING: limits.h: proceeding with the preprocessor's result
> | configure: WARNING:     ## ------------------------------------ ##
> | configure: WARNING:     ## Report this to address@hidden ##
> | configure: WARNING:     ## ------------------------------------ ##
>
> Please, report this to the package maintainers, as it's a configure.ac
> problem.  The Autoconf 2.57 doc says:
>
>       Previous versions of Autoconf merely checked whether the header was
>    accepted by the preprocessor.  This was changed because the old test was
>    inappropriate for typical uses.  Headers are typically used to compile,
>    not merely to preprocess, and the old behavior sometimes accepted
>    headers that clashed at compile-time.  If you need to check whether a
>    header is preprocessable, you can use `AC_PREPROC_IFELSE' (*note
>    Running the Preprocessor::).
>    
>       This scheme, which improves the robustness of the test, also requires
>    that you make sure that headers that must be included before the
>    HEADER-FILE be part of the INCLUDES, (*note Default Includes::).  If
>    looking for `bar.h', which requires that `foo.h' be included before if
>    it exists, we suggest the following scheme:
>    
>    
>    AC_CHECK_HEADERS([foo.h])
>    AC_CHECK_HEADERS([bar.h], [], [],
>    [#if HAVE_FOO_H
>    # include 
>    # endif
>    ])
>
> Thanks!