Re: Patch to check for required programs when building from source checkout

[Jim Meyering]

Ed Avis <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jim Meyering <jim <at> meyering.net> writes:
>
> [funky automake version numbers]
>
>>When in doubt, use sort -V from the latest coreutils:
>>
>>    $ printf 'automake-1.10%s\n' .1 a|sort -V
>>    automake-1.10.1
>>    automake-1.10a
>
> That's not the result I get:
>
> % printf 'automake-1.10%s\n' .1 a|sort -V
> automake-1.10a
> automake-1.10.1
> % sort --version | head -n 1
> sort (GNU coreutils) 7.0.11-5996-dirty

Oh!  I was using a just-too-old (pre-7.0) version there.
Thanks for checking and keeping me honest.
IMHO this means automake is muddying the waters by giving
something-newer-than automake-1.10.1 the version string "1.10a".

>>I don't want to maintain yet another package-specific file/script,
>>so I've been toying with the idea of adding generic code to
>>bootstrap that would automatically determine more prerequisites
>>like this.  E.g., if it sees that gperf will be used by this
>>package, then it'd ensure it's usable.
>
> Wouldn't it be simpler to include a file bootstrap.required_progs containing a
> list one per line and then have something like
>
> if test -e bootstrap.required_progs; then
>     for p in `cat bootstrap.required_progs`; do
>         if ! $p --help >/dev/null; then
>             echo You must install $p
>             exit 1
>         fi
>     done
> done
>
> Autodetecting them seems a bit baroque, but I guess you could grep -r or
> something...

Ok.  That seems simple enough.
And you could even put the list in the already-pkg-specific
bootstrap.conf file.

Ready to write the patch? ;-)