begin quoting Gus Wirth as of Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 06:36:44PM -0700: > I have been recompiling various things, the latest of which is lirc > <http://www.lirc.org> One thing I notice when doing the configure step > is that configure checks for a Fortran compiler. I've noticed this in > many other packages as well, despite the fact that there is no Fortran > code to be found. > > Is this just one of those programming barnacles left over from a long > time ago that no one has bothered to fix, or does it have some other > relevance that I'm not aware of?
I think it's just laziness (or a side-effect of the complexity of the auto-* tools)... I've seen a lot of checks for fortran fail, and everything configures, compiles, and runs just fine. I also see a lot of stuff get checked over and over again (a favorite is maximum argument size or somesuch). Some stuff seems to get cached, and other stuff doesn't, with little rhyme or reason as to which way. -- It's about time to start designing a replacement to autoconf/automake. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
