Re: [Nmh-workers] problem compiling nmh 1.6 on linux gentoo

[Ken Hornstein]

>> Normally we don't expect anyone to run a 'make clean' after running
>> configure (I'm trying to figure out why you would want to do that).
>
>Really?  I should think that would be a supported procedure.  FWIW,
>I would not expect either "clean" or "distclean" to remove files that
>were shipped in the tarball; only "make maintainer-clean", or some
>such target not meant to be called by end users, ought to do that.

Well, it should work fine, assuming everything in the toolchain is
consistent.  Buuuttt ...

>I would put the true blame on whatever decided to add -ansi -pedantic
>(particularly the latter) to the compiler switches.  Those are useful
>switches for software developers to use, if they are concerned about
>hewing as closely as possible to ancient C standards ... but one should
>never ever set things up to select them by default for builds in-the-wild.
>That won't ever lead to anything but grief, as it did here, because you
>can't expect that system tools or system header files are going to still
>be trying to be C89-compliant, let alone satisfy -pedantic.

Sigh.  I guess that one is on us, then.  That's the default compiler switches
if you don't specify them.  The autoconf code that selects those is
rather hairy; I am unclear how we settled on the current defaults.  I'm
open to revisiting them.

(Personally, I still think it's rather unfriendly for tools like flex to
generate code with new-style comments, but I'm probably in the minority
on that one).

And you know ... the weirdest thing is, that particular comment in the
flex skeletion does not appear in the revision history of flex anywhere.
It's definitely in the distribution, but not in the tree on sourceforge.
So I don't know who inserted it.

--Ken

--Ken