Re: Building gawk Depends on awk

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Marius Maraloi <marius.maraloi@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2020 19:17:42 +0100
> 
> 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?

I believe you do need some version of Awk available, see
README_D/README.bootstrap.