For anyone who needs to recover, On my RedHat 8.0 machine /dev/null is a character device with major mode 1, minor mode 3 and mode a+rw - use mknod to make a new one. On Solaris, it's a soft link to /devices/pseudo/mm@0:null - use ln to recreate.
Bill. On 8 Jan 2003, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote: > > There is a very nasty bug in LyX 1.2.2 configure script: if you > configure as root and an error occurs during the configure step > (e.g. xforms not found), the the script will delete the /dev/null > device. This undoubtly leads to very bad effect, since /dev/null is a > very basic device in any unix system. > > If you have been victim of this problem, please complain here and I'll > try to find out how to reconstruct it (some magic command that I do > not know yet). > > I plan to release a 1.2.3 version that does not have this problem very > soon. The same problem occurs in 1.3.0cvs (and 1.3.0pre1 I guess) but > is fixed now in cvs. > > A bit of background: there has been for a long time some code in > LyX configure script that removed the config.cache file (that keep > tracks of tests results) when an error has occured. This allows to > re-run the script once you have made correction without seeing the old > results. However, starting with autoconf 2.5x, the cache file now > defaults to /dev/null (i.e. no cache). Since LyX 1.2.2 was the first > version distributed with an autoconf script generated with autoconf > 2.52, this triggered this awful behaviour. > > Sorry for the problems that this may cause to your systems... > > JMarc >
