RE: Announcing Autoconf 2.49d

[Tim Van Holder]

> 
> > John> I am using OS/2 which uses DOS paths and seperators, and drive
> > John> letters.  Should I expect the path to be searched for sundry
> > John> support files?
> > 
> > Support for DOS and OS/2 is not yet complete.
> 
> Couldn't any support for OS/2 fall in line with Win32 support?
> They are identical as far as paths are concerned, ie. use of drive
> letters, path seperators, and use of '\' instead of '/'.

The problem is that both Cygwin's and DJGPP's bash are able to find foo.exe
if given 'test -f foo'.  OS/2's shell probably doesn't.
If you don't mind autoconf finding directories and thinking they're
the programs it wants, you could try adding
  as_executable_p='test -x'
to your config.site; but this assumes OS/2 shell finds foo.exe if given
  'test -x foo'.

Alternatively, you could write some small batch file or C program that
will return 0 if the path name passed to it is executable (albeit with
a possible extension added), and set as_executable_p to point to it.

A simple example would be:

-- is-program.sh
#!/bin/sh

test -f $1     && exit 0
test -f $1.exe && exit 0
test -f $1.pl  && exit 0
test -f $1.bat && exit 0
test -f $1.cmd && exit 0
test -f $1.com && exit 0
-- end of is-program.sh
(modify the list to reflect the extension you want to consider)

When as_executable_p is set to point to this script, configure will call
it each time it tries to determine whether a program is available.

I'm planning on adding support for system-defined executable extensions
to 2.51, so all these problems will probably go away then (provided there
is a clean way to determine what extensions should be checked).