I found the ticket that introduced this failing behavior, so I'm resending
my message below with a fixed-up subject line to enter into RT. In brief,
this patch incorrectly assumes that all compilers accept a '-h', '--help',
or '/?' switch. Any compiler that doesn't is deemed 'not found', and
there is no way to override it. Extending the list of options to try is
not a sensible forward-looking portable strategy.
On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, chromatic wrote:
>
> > On Monday 19 March 2007 08:19, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> >
> > > This one falls over immediately during Configure. Even setting
> > > verbose=2, I don't see why:
> > >
> > > Parrot Version 0.4.9 Configure 2.0
> > > Copyright (C) 2001-2007, The Perl Foundation.
> > >
> > > [ . . . ]
> > >
> > > Determining what C compiler and linker to use...
> > > No compiler found (tried 'cc')
> > >
> > > Yet 'cc' works perfectly fine, and has for years. I have changed
> > > nothing in my build scripts.
> >
> > The heuristic for detecting a compiler is to invoke it with some sort of
> > help
> > flag, where $cc contains the executable name of your compiler:
> >
> > $cc -h
> > $cc --help
> > $cc /?
> >
> > If there's another option to pass to your compiler that causes it to do
> > nothing except exit with a successful error code, we can put it in there.
> > (Checking $ENV{PATH} and trying to divine the proper extension is another
> > option, but I like that one a little less.)
>
> In my opinion, that way lies madness. Generating a list of options which
> all possible current and future compilers will accept is not only
> impossible, it's pointless. It's also aggravating that there's no way to
> override it or tell Configure "Yes, cc is my compiler even though it's not
> in your list."
>
> The only way to tell for sure if you have a working compiler is to try to
> compile and run something. After the user has been prompted for all the
> flags, simply try to compile and run a simple test program. If it works,
> fine. If it doesn't, then complain with an informative error message. (It
> may be appropriate to skip the 'run' step in a cross-compilation
> environment and hope that the user got the flags right if the compilation
> succeeds.)
>
>
--
Andy Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
