Re: Building gawk Depends on awk

[arnold]

Greetings.

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > 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.

Eli's right. You can use Brian Kernighan's awk from
https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk as a bootstrap version. It does
not have a configure script, just a makefile.

Thanks,

Arnold