Re: Libidn 1 config glitch → determines ‘--no-install’ unsupported, uses it anyway

[Gordon Steemson]

Building from tarballs, but that's not something that would change anything.

When you run "make check", the Makefile instructs libtool to do various things. 
 Some of these involve a command line that includes a "--no-install" flag, 
though whether this is passed to libtool or is something libtool tells the 
linker or both I do not know.  As I understand matters, whatever receives that 
flag does not understand it when it is running on a Mac.  This causes the error 
channel to receive a bright red "[warning]" message, with accompanying text to 
the effect that "--no-install" is not understood – and, often but not always, 
that "--no-fast-install" is being assumed instead.  This has no actual effect 
that I can tell, but does clutter up the error log with dozens of useless 
lines.  (Some other packages produce over a hundred of them, so it could be 
worse.)

Gordon S.

> On Nov 19, 2024, at 2:21 PM, Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> wrote:
> 
> What is the actual problem you are seeing?  Are you building from
> tarballs, or from git?
> 
> /Simon
> 
> Gordon Steemson <gsteemso@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Ah, my apologies.  "--no-install" is not an argument someone might
>> give to configure, it is something Libtool uses (most often seen
>> during "make check"), and I was proposing that a configure test should
>> exist to determine when it shouldn't do so.
>> 
>> I don't know whether such a thing has already been written or if
>> various other projects' Makefiles simply never pass "--no-install" to
>> libtool in the first place.  Either way, libidn is far from the only
>> package that DOES use it, and it's more a cosmetic annoyance than
>> anything serious, unless the person installing the software is
>> particularly twitchy about warning messages.
>> 
>> Gordon S.
>> 
>>>> On Nov 19, 2024, at 11:15 AM, Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> What did you expect ./configure --no-install to do?  I don't think it is
>>> a common ./configure parameter with any well-established semantics.  How
>>> does 'make check' use --no-install?  I don't know what '--no-install'
>>> refers to really.
>>> 
>>> /Simon
>>> 
>>> Gordon Steemson <gsteemso@gmail.com> writes:
>>> 
>>>> Um.  False alarm.  ./configure does not actually check for ‘--no-install’ 
>>>> – I had it mixed up with another test that it _does_ perform.
>>>> 
>>>> (Maybe it should test for that in future?)
>>>> 
>>>> Gordon S.
>>>> 
>>>>>> On Nov 16, 2024, at 9:18 PM, Gordon Steemson <gsteemso@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> What the subject line says.  I built the most recent libidn 1
>>>>> package, v. 1.42, and even though ./configure correctly observed
>>>>> that ‘--no-install’ is not understood by my Mac, `make check` used
>>>>> it liberally anyway.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I realize this is very far from an Earth-shattering problem, but
>>>>> seeing that much warning-label red lettering go past on the console
>>>>> is not a fun experience in the time before you work out that it’s
>>>>> not anything _important_.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Sincerely,
>>>>> Gordon Steemson
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> <signature.asc>
>> 
>> 
> <signature.asc>