Re: trouble compiling

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 05/19/2012 12:33 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 18 May 2012 15:18, Daniel J Sebald<address@hidden>  wrote:
> > On 05/18/2012 01:10 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> > > On 18 May 2012 13:50, Daniel J Sebald<address@hidden>
> > >   wrote:
> > >
> > > > 1) Mild warnings in the configure file (i.e., warnings that don't
> > > > appear at the very end, but instead are only amongst a whole lot
> > > > of output) that really end up being needed in the default
> > > > compilation.  Here's an example:
> > > >
> > > > configure:59086: WARNING: I didn't find flex, but it's only a
> > > > problem if you need to reconstruct lex.cc
> > >
> > >
> > > I recently tried to alleviate this problem:
> > >
> > >      http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/28e53daab1f8
> > >
> > > I thought I did make those warnings appear at the end all together.
> > > Am I wrong?
>
> > I'm not seeing anything stand out near the end of the file.
>
> Ah. Yeah. My bad. I broke that in 14605:28e53daab1f8. It's the first
> time I touch the build system, so please be forgiving. :-)
>
> Does this make it better?
>
>      http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/8a84849ad986
>
> It would be great if you could test with various system configurations
> and let me know how it goes.

I uninstall the things that were causing problems the other day and went 
through the configure process again.  It now does give warnings at the 
end of the file.

The output for the warning messages is a bit messy however.  It isn't 
indented like the other warnings and there are several blank lines.  The 
descriptions are a bit wordy for computer program output.  Could this be 
modified as with the following examples?

 AC_MSG_NOTICE([NOTE: Libraries or auxiliary programs may be skipped if 
they are])
 AC_MSG_NOTICE([      not found OR if they are missing required 
features on your])
 AC_MSG_NOTICE([      system. ])

 OCTAVE_CONFIGURE_WARNING([flex not found.  Needed to reconstruct 
lex.cc, such])
   AC_MSG_NOTICE([         as from VCS sources.])

 OCTAVE_CONFIGURE_WARNING([bison not found.  Needed to reconstruct 
parse.cc, such])
   AC_MSG_NOTICE([         as from VCS sources.])

Would that work?  In addition to being a more condensed summary, it also 
gets rid of the "but it's only a problem" phrase which I think makes the 
warning sound insignificant.  Let the user interpret how important the 
warning is to his or her situation.

It might be nice to have a ./configure option that allows a more 
stringent "maintainer" set of tests.  These would error instead of warn 
on the cases the patch modified.  It isn't that necessary though if we 
could make README.devel more descriptive.

Dan