On 3/8/2011 5:35 PM, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Mar 2011, John E. Malmberg wrote:
>
>> Sometime during the 7.19 release, configure was changed to use a macro
>> $as_echo that used a shell to do an eval instead of echo for writing
>> out status.
>
> Unfortunately that's controlled by autoconf that generates the configure
> script and not by the source script (configure.ac) we write. Thus the
> bug must've been introduced when I upgraded autoconf on the machine I
> use to build releases on... Can you check the top of the configure
> script of the last one you know works and see what autoconf version
> number it says?

# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.61 for curl -.

>> Would it be possible to get a change in the configure script to detect
>> and accommodate OpenVMS?
>
> It already tries to detect the best way and if it does it wrong now, it
> is an autoconf bug. I did a quick google but I couldn't find any other
> mention of poeple having this problem with autoconf on OpenVMS though...

Autoconf does not run on OpenVMS. I tried to get it to run on Samba V4,
and discovered that the GNV GNU tools port and existing VMS Perl were
not up to it. I have since put about 80% of the stuff it needed into
VMS Perl, but have not had time to do the reset. And in monitoring the
perl development mailing list, no one else has done it either.

In the mean time, I just use an NFS export in common with VMS and run
run autoconf when needed from Linux. So far I have only needed to run
autoconf with Samba V4, as I was pulling that from the source repository.

I will look at having the build procedure on OpenVMS patch the configure
script before it is run, as I will probably start finding this behavior
in other projects. It looks like if I just set $as_echo to run the echo
built in, that it should be good enough to get by.

Many of the VMS programmers just do not bother with learning how to use
the port of Bash and the ported GNU tools and just hand craft the
config.h and create a build script using the native tools.

This works for projects as simple as curl, but does not scale to some of
the larger projects that I have been working on, such as SAMBA V4.

And from what I have seen, the VMS native build procedures do not build
curl with access to all the libraries that are supplied by VMS, they
just build a more simpler version.

I really do not have the cycles to look at getting autoconf to produce
sane values for VMS. From the looks of the tests that it is generating
for curl and other projects, I think quite a bit of the tests that it is
doing could be made more accurate for all platforms, and it looks like
about 25% to 30% of the tests are totally useless on all platforms.

On *NIX that may not be a big deal, but on my 667 MHz Alpha with slow
IDE disks, it take about one hour to run the configure script. So
removing that 25% that is useless is a big deal.

Regards,
-John

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Received on 2011-03-09