Re: AC_PROG_CC problems on Windows with MKS Shell

[Wan-Teh Chang]

"Lars J. Aas" wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 10:37:01AM -0800, Wan-Teh Chang wrote:
> : I am trying to use autoconf on Windows with the
> : MKS Toolkit, which consists of a Korn shell and
> : the usual Unix utilities.
> 
> Woopie doo, yet another Windows environment :)

Well, isn't this exactly what autoconf is for? :)

In fact, MKS Toolkit is quite popular.  The "official"
Services for Unix (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/sfu/)
from Microsoft is based on MKS Toolkit.  I guess the
reason config.guess and config.sub don't recognize MKS
right now is that it is not free of charge like Cygwin
and U/Win are.

The Windows port of GNU make also supports MKS Toolkit.

> [...]
> : Now the fun part.  AC_PROG_CC fails for me for
> : two reasons:
> : 1. It tries to find the program 'cl' on the PATH.
> :    However, the MKS shell takes the specified
> :    pathname literally and does not automatically
> :    append the .exe suffix.  I found that if I
> :    manually modify the configure script to use
> :    'cl.exe', then it works.
> 
> The Windows port of the Korn shell is the part that ought
> to handle this detail IMO.

The command that's causing trouble is the 'test -f pathname'
command.  Since you can have both 'foo' and 'foo.exe' in
the same directory, it's not clear whether 'test -f foo'
should only test for the existence of 'foo' or it should
also consider 'foo.bat', 'foo.exe', etc. (appending the
suffixes listed in the PATHEXT environment variable).

> : Can AC_PROG_CC be modified to look for 'cl.exe'
> : instead of 'cl' on Windows?  I think that both
> : Cygwin and U/WIN should be able to handle 'cl.exe'.
> 
> That would be a poor fix (you would for instance not be able to
> envelope cl.exe with a bat-file if you lock the extension to .exe).

Good point.

> A better fix would be to have AC_PATH_PROG (or whichever macro it
> is that searches for the compiler) to also consider implied exe-
> extensions on systems that use them, and add the extension to the
> returned program name.

Agreed.  How do I submit this feature request?

Wan-Teh