what happened to stdarg.h or varargs.h

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 03, 2013 at 01:11:18PM -0700, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>> Okay, I tried apt-file, and got a confusion of things.  Since my
>> default compiler is gcc-4.6.3, probably the most relevant are
>> gcc-4.6: /usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/include/cross-stdarg.h
>> gcc-4.6: /usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/include/stdarg.h
>> <<-- I'd guess this is the one
>> gcc-4.6-arm-linux-gnueabi: /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabi/4.6/include/stdarg.h
>> gcc-4.6-arm-linux-gnueabihf:
>> /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.6/include/stdarg.h
>
> The exact location doesn't matter, as it's on your compiler's default
> include path.
>
>> But this leaves a secondary question: why didn't autotools find it?
>> You can duplicate my problem (or not) very quickly by downloading
>>    http://www.sourceware.org/autobook/complex-1.0.tar.gz
>> which is from the web page for the book on autotools
>>
>> Unpack it, cd to the directory and
>>   ./bootstrap </dev/null
>>   ./configure </dev/null
>>
>> and see if configure dies or finishes.  Why I need the </dev/null is
>> another mystery, but without them the process hangs forever.
>
> This example package would appear to be extremely out of date.  It
> simply doesn't work at all with current Autotools in saucy.  Maybe it
> isn't the best example to use!  From inspecting it, it appears to have
> been written for Autoconf 2.13, which is prehistoric.
>
> I have no such problem with the process hanging, either on precise or
> saucy.  You might want to "strace -f" it to see which subprocess is
> responsible; perhaps it's the fault of some locally-installed program.
>
> The configure script actually finds stdarg.h fine for me when I build it
> on precise (where it more or less struggles into life), but it fails
> immediately afterwards with a message that *looks* as though it failed
> to find stdarg.h.  This appears to be due to an underquoted macro.
>
> I would consign this example to the dustbin of history and find
> something better-maintained; it's sufficiently old that the best it will
> do nowadays is teach you bad habits.  Perhaps one of those linked in the
> "Wednesday, Feb 8th 2006" entry on http://www.sourceware.org/autobook/
> would serve.

I expected this to be a learning experience, and it is.  I'm only
fooling with that package in order to work with the book, and it was
simply the first one I tried to build.  I'll look a bit harder.

I need something quite a bit more tutorial that the GNU documentation.
 I find that stuff useful once I'm really familiar with a package, but
otherwise it's more like a learning wall than a learning curve.

You'll see I have another thread about autoconf itself, but it's a
problem with the modern version that does not appear to be present in
autoconf2.59.

I'm experimenting with downgrading my tools to stuff that will work
with the book's examples, so I have some idea what I need to do to
upgrade a project to use autotools so I can use GNULIB.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.
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