Autotools

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 2:06 PM, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 03, 2013 at 11:30:04AM -0700, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>> Is it just me?  The last few times I used the autotools programs, I
>> had to redirect input from /dev/null, or they would never finish.
>>
>> I mean
>> ./configure
>> long ago would run by itself.  The same for the others.  No longer.
>> At least not for me.
>>
>> So, if it's not just me, I'll probably post a bug in the appropriate
>> place, but until then I thought I'd find out if other programmers
>> using Ubuntu or Xubuntu are seeing this.
>
> I have never seen this and I use the Autotools and their output on a
> daily basis.  However, every configure script is different; Autoconf is
> a program that generates configure based on an input file - that is,
> it's effectively a programming language, so it's fairly meaningless to
> talk about a configure script failing without saying which one.
>
> Note that not all scripts that are called "configure" are actually
> generated by Autoconf.  The ones with anomalous behaviour like this
> generally aren't.

Actually, I'm seeing this on autoconf itself under some circumstances.
 The details elude me so far, but it appears that if I start a fresh
shell,
$ /usr/bin/autoconf --version
will hang, while
$ /usr/bin/autoconf --version </dev/null
will not.  This is repeatable, but sometimes after I've fooled around
with things for a while it stops happening in that shell, so I presume
some environment variable changes.

This does not happen if I'm sudo -i root, but does if I just sudo the
command.  It resulmes if I exit the sudo-ed root.  I cannot figure
this out.

Before I file a bug, I'd like some other experiences and maybe some
help triaging what makes it happen.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.
Please consider the environment before printing this email.