Building gawk Depends on awk

[Marius Maraloi]

Hello gawk mainainers,

While attempting to build gawk-5.1.0 I encountered an autoconf-induced 
cyclical dependency on awk: Without any awk installed, ./configure fails 
in the final stages - when running ./config.status, (at least with my 
autoconf-2.69).

    ./config.status: line 1178: awk: command not found

Surely there's a way to have ./configure generate an awk-free 
./config.status - I mean determining the carriage-return 
character/sequence isn't exactly awk's raison-d'etre :)

    ac_cs_awk_cr=`$AWK 'BEGIN { print "a\rb" }' </dev/null 2>/dev/null`

I'm not an autoconf expert, maybe it would make sense to raise a bug 
against autoconf questioning it's dependence on awk in situations where 
it's not strictly necessary...  but until then maybe someone here would 
able to generate a ./configure which does not depend on awk, and include 
that in the gawk source distribution?

That would also leave users free to 'autoreconf' and shoot themselves in 
the foot if they so desire...

FWIW, I've seen this done in mawk (although generated by an older 
autoconf-2.52).

--

Marius Maraloi