It's been rumoured that Ben Miller said:
>
> Thanks for all the help everyone. I think I have a fairly good
> understanding of what's going on now. My main problems now are:
>
> 1. I don't seem to have all the stuff I needed in the
> libstdc++-2.90.8.tr.gz. Specifically I'm missing the config.sub file?
why are you trying to do this yourself? Why not just install the
pre-compiled .deb or .rpm for this? Its a *lot* easier to install
the pre-compiled, pre-configured packages ...
> > They really told you to do that CXX=gcc thing ? That's unusual.
> > It amounts to requiring that C++ be compiled with a C compiler.
> > Oh well, they probably know what they're doing.
gcc and g++ are written in C not C++. Thus you use C to compile it/them.
(the fortran compiler is written in C also ... )
> > >1. Why can I not just type "CXX=gcc configure" (i.e. without the
> > "./"
> > >bit)? (I'm too used to MS-DOS, I think!)
> >
> > Depends on the configuration of your system. If the PATH
> > environment variable includes "." (the current directory),
> > AND the directories that come before "." in the PATH do not
> > happen to contain a command named "configure", then you
> > can use just "configure". Otherwise, you have to specify
> > "./configure".
> >
> > "./configure" is best because it works in all cases and
> > always does the right thing, even if you have other
> > "configure" commands lying around in the path.
> >
> > One of the differences between DOS and Unix is that, with
> > the latter, "." is not special w.r.t. to the command path ;
> > like any other directory, it's searched for executables *only*
> > if it's explicitly listed in PATH.
> >
> > [Security note: You might be tempted to change your PATH to
> > something like PATH=.:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin to get a more
> > DOS-like behaviour but that would not be a good idea security
> > wise. Putting ./ or other non-system directories first makes
> > you more vulnerable to trojans.]
Sepcifically, while you were out to lunch, some joker might have copied
a binary called 'cp' (or 'ls' or 'ps' or whatever) to your current
directory. When you come back from lunch, you type `cp filea fileb`
at the keyboard, and, instead of invoking /usr/bin/cp which is what
you thought you were invoking, you get ./cp which might do something
very very different. Ooops. Jokes on you.
--linas
