Re: trouble compiling

[Mike Miller]

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Daniel J Sebald <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

I'd be okay with the wording change.

IMHO Octave is going above and beyond with these warnings and extra
checks for maintainer tools.  The checks in configure and any warning
messages it produces are mostly for users, not maintainers, who are
strictly building from a properly released source tarball.  And those
users don't need these maintainer tools to build Octave.

> 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.

I'd vote for updating README.devel and/or HACKING over more configure options.

I also want to point out that a lot of GNU projects work the same way
and there might be some documentation already out there that Octave
could reference or copy instead of reinventing.

-- 
mike