Re: build failure if rlog is not installed

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Eric,

> I tried building gettext 0.18 from source using ./configure
> --without-cvs --with-git, on a Fedora 13 machine (where rlog is not
> installed by default), and it ended up creating a corrupt
> archive.git.tar.gz (no tags and no contents), which meant that
> installing it produced a useless autopoint:
> 
> + git checkout -q gettext-0.14.1
> error: pathspec 'gettext-0.14.1' did not match any file(s) known to git.
> + rm -rf tmpwrk15184
> + func_fatal_error 'infrastructure files for version 0.14.1 not found;
> this is autopoint from GNU gettext-tools 0.18'

Yes, such an 'autopoint' program is useless.

> I looked back at the build log, and saw this:
> 
> if test -f archive.cvs.tar.gz; then \
>         inputfile=archive.cvs.tar.gz; \
>       else \
>         inputfile='.'/archive.cvs.tar.gz; \
>       fi; \
>       ./convert-archive cvs git "$inputfile" archive.git.tar.gz
> ./convert-archive: line 157: rlog: command not found
> [master (root-commit) d642136] Empty directory
> ./convert-archive: line 275: cd: *: No such file or directory
> tar: This does not look like a tar archive
> tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
> # On branch master
> nothing to commit (working directory clean)
> fatal: '*' is not a valid tag name.
> 
> But make kept chugging away with non-zero status.  The lack of rlog
> should have been sufficient to cause make to exit with non-zero status,
> rather than letting me proceed on to 'make install' with a broken
> binary.

Thank you for the suggestion. It has been implemented already:
  
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gettext.git;a=commitdiff;h=1bb730890565107c4a9b9761861a37715fa2a79d>

> And perhaps configure should warn if this particular build 
> dependency is missing, rather than waiting until 'make' to find out.

True. Maybe we should try to make it a common idiom to
  1) List all dependencies in a DEPENDENCIES file,
  2) Print, at the end of 'configure', the status of all the dependencies,
     with a warning for those that are missing.

> Meanwhile, I found no mention of rlog in either DEPENDENCIES, README, or
> INSTALL.

This will be documented in the next release:
  
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gettext.git;a=commitdiff;h=e840f3f60cb4e34a5e75d980a7f9bb560e667b82>

I'm sorry for the trouble that this has caused you. Thank you for the useful
suggestions.

Bruno