Hello Michael, * Michael Witten wrote on Sun, May 18, 2008 at 05:59:26AM CEST: > The mkinstalldirs script does not work on Mac OS X (Leopard); > > Mac OS X's mkdir does not have --version and it seems to be > thread-safe.
Unfortunately, the AC_PROG_MKDIR_P macro from Autoconf is not sharp in its test, in the sense that it may choose 'install-sh -d' (or mkinstalldirs, with older Autoconf/Automake versions), even if the system's mkdir accepts -p and is parallel-safe. One problem here is that there is no simple feature test to ensure parallel execution safety. We could somehow decide based on $host but that would require us to pull in AC_CANONICAL_HOST which is at least a bit ugly, and also a maintenance hassle. That said, this issue is not a bug in the sense that it causes wrong behavior: $MKDIR_P should be functional anyway, just more slowly than would be needed on the particular system. You can work around it with ./configure MKDIR_P="/usr/bin/mkdir -p" or you could initialize $ac_cv_path_mkdir appropriately in your config.site file. (These comments apply to the latest stable Autoconf and Automake.) Still, since this has come up before, I assume a patch to improve things here (plus somebody volunteering to keep the list up to date?) would be appreciated. Hope that helps. Cheers, Ralf
