Re: hello-2.1.91 build failure on MacOS X

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Bruno,

* Bruno Haible wrote on Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 10:40:31PM CEST:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > We could ask help2man to have it return a different exit
> > status if it gets an exit status of 126 from the program, and have it
> > return 63 then, which `missing' will interpret as version mismatch.
> 
> Uuhhh. I'm not sure you get a defined exit status when you try to execute
> a program from a different platform. On older platforms, such as SunOS 4,
> an executable from a different platform was piped into /bin/sh by the
> exec() calls, yielding tons of error messages.

Oh.  Not that the autotools still support SunOS 4 in general, but that'd
still be ugly.

> > I can take this to bug-help2man if we can agree on proposing the change.
> 
> Why would it be help2man's business to deal with cross-compiles? IMO it
> is configure's business. What do you think about this patch?

First, I think you wouldn't want `make' to keep trying to update
hello.1, so a rule like
  if test '$(cross_compiling)' = yes; then touch $@; else \
    $(HELP2MAN) --name="Friendly Greeting Program" ../src/hello -o $@; \
  fi

would be suited a bit better.  Second though, there are many
"cross-compiling" situations where executing the program actually works,
so the above is at least a wee bit suboptimal.  (Think i486 -> i686, or
Cygwin -> MinGW, or some simulator: on my GNU/Linux system, w32 binaries
are automatically sent to wine for consumption...)

But I'd agree with Karl that this issue isn't important enough to
warrant investing a lot of work.

Cheers,
Ralf