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]