[LLVMdev] Missing Configure Checks

[Jim Grosbach]

On Oct 20, 2011, at 7:01 AM, shea at shealevy.com wrote:

>> 
>> On Oct 20, 2011, at 3:13 AM, Shea Levy wrote:
>> 
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> The llvm 2.9 configure script fails to check for groff, causing a
>>> failure very late in the game when building man pages, and, on OSX,
>>> sw_vers. I'll try to write a patch for this myself, but autoconf is
>>> largely black magic to me so I thought I'd throw this out there in case
>>> someone more experienced in this stuff wants to fix this.
>> 
>> What OSX are you on that doesn't have groff or sw_vers?
>> 
> 
> The missing groff check was found on my Linux box, and on both my OSX and
> Linux box I use a package/build manager (nix [0]) that, among other
> things, performs each build essentially in a chroot containing only the
> dependencies you explicitly tell it to contain. Usually when adding a new
> package I add dependencies one by one as different configure steps fail,
> and these two just failed later.

Ah, OK. That makes sense.

A check for groff is a good idea. That's definitely not something we should count on being there.

sw_vers should always be there for OSX, and never be there for any other platform (it's an Apple specific thing). It's only used when building for Darwin, so it's safe to leave that w/o a configure-time check. I don't really have an opinion about whether it's overkill to add an explicit check for it anyway.

You've probably already found it, but in case not, the input script used to build configure is in autoconf/configure.ac.

Regards,
  Jim