Sorry for arriving late to this discussion. As a long term user of HP-UX and the various native C compilers there I am interested in this discussion but I admit that I don't quite understand where things have converged to at this point. Throwing caution to the wind I will jump into it anyway. :-)
First: > + ./configure CC="cc -Ae" It doesn't seem that this should ever be necessary (except for a case I will mention in a moment) since I think it should get added anyway if the compiler detected is the HP ANSI C compiler. The place where it is needed is when gcc is installed. If gcc is not installed then I don't think forcing it is needed. But if gcc is found then autoconf prefers it. In that case it *is* necessary to force CC="cc -Ae" in order to force the HP ANSI C compiler. In particular I do this when wanting to also force +DD64 to compile 64-bit executables. Bruno Haible wrote: > 2) AC_PROG_CC / AC_PROG_CC_C89 > Two things still to do: > - The AC_PROG_CC should reject this compiler if it does not support ANSI C. It seems reasonable to me that at this time AC_PROG_CC would require ANSI support and reject non-ANSI compilers. > Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > > Judging from the manual, I'd expect AC_PROG_CC_STDC to achieve this > > (so if it doesn't, it should be fixed). > > But AC_PROG_CC_STDC is not used by many packages. AC_PROG_CC_STDC tests for > C99, which many packages don't need. Amanda (from which this report comes > from) does not use it. Gnulib does not use it (except in module 'stdarg'). > What these programs would need, according to the current autoconf, is: > > AC_PROG_CC_C89 > if test "$ac_cv_prog_cc_c89" = no; then > echo "C compiler does not support ANSI C" 1>&2 > exit 1 > fi > > But no one does this... I looked and I haven't been doing this either. :-/ If I read through all of the discussion correctly then as I understand it the fundamental issue is that AC_PROG_CC will detect, allow and use classic K&R compilers. Time has been passing and these are very few and far between with the exception of the native "bundled" HP-UX C compiler, which is the classic K&R C compiler, without the add-on ANSI compiler. Sites either have GCC installed or have the ANSI C compiler installed and very few have neither. This means that configure.ac creators haven't noticed that they haven't been following the documented behavior. (Me included.) I think enough time has passed that today the least surprising behavior would be for AC_PROG_CC to require an ANSI compiler and fail if one is not found. Bob
