Re: Problem compiling from 2.1.14 on Solaris 8

[Russell Van Tassell]

On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 02:52:18PM -0400, Luke Youngblood wrote:
> I think I'm getting off-topic here, but it would be really nice if autoconf
> was smart enough to search for the GNU utilities first, rather than just
> assuming the m4 it found in the path was GNU compatible.  See, this works
> great on Linux systems where there is only one m4 and it's always the GNU
> version, but on Sun systems, the GNU version of m4 will be called gm4.  On
> more than one occasion I've had to fool autoconf by symlinking gm4->m4 and
> placing it first in the path in front of Sun's m4.  If autoconf was
> intelligent enough to search for gm4 first, we wouldn't have a lot of these
> cross-platform compatibility issues.

Actually, GNU m4 is installed as "m4" by default in /usr/local/bin...
unless, of course, you use "--program-prefix=g" in the configuration
step.  With that said, many problems with Solaris compilations post
Solaris 7 (really 7 and above) in my experience tend to be more easily
mitigated simply by making sure that your third-party utilities occur
earlier in your path (eg.  /usr/local/bin) and the /usr/ucb stuff is
last, if at all...

Yeah, Sun's "waking up" lately and installing a lot of these now (or at
least making them more easily available), though they're also notorious
for borking things to the point that you really just need to go compile
and install them anyway (sorry, but stupid issues like bind, sendmail
and perl in the past have just... well, left a seriously bad taste in
my mouth).

Just my $0.02...
Russell

-- 
Russell M. Van Tassell
russell@loosenut.com

"I love deadlines.  I especially like the whooshing sound they make as
 they go flying by."