Hello folks,
we received a request to enable the MPFR support for gawk in Fedora: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1362549
Since (from my understanding) the MPFR library allows users to have much more precise computations than with standard floating numbers, I see the request reasonable and I will enable the support.
But also, that made me curious, and I looked what else gawk supports. According to ./configure --help, I see that there are other several *optional* packages, which can be enabled:
* libsigsegv - I have already enabled this, because I've found out it was disabled around year 2009, IIRC, because of some bug which made build to fail. It was apparently fixed, but not re-enabled in gawk again (seems like previous maintainers have forgotten about that).
* libiconv - I guess enabling this package does not make sense anymore, because Fedora tries very hard for its translations to be correct, and files be either in ASCII or UTF-8. (This package is not present at Fedora anymore, AFAIK.)
* libintl - should be part of gettext library in Fedora, and we use gettext during package build.
* --with-whiny-user-strftime - I guess that enabling this does not make sense on Fedora either, since the build is passing normally without it (IMHO, Fedora is not a deficient system :)).
I think for Fedora, the most interesting optional packages are:
* --with-gnu-ld [default=no] - since Fedora uses the linker from GNU binutils collection, I guess this should be enabled (I'm not sure if this is detected during ./configure run)
* --with-mpfr - already discussed above
* --with-readline - with this one, I'm really have no clue. Seeing the library description, I can't decide if it would be useful anyhow to Fedora users...
Could you, please, let me know if my assumptions are correct or not? And maybe give some example on how enabling readline library support can be useful to regular/normal users?
Thank you very much in advance!
Best regards,
David Kaspar [Dee'Kej]
Associate Software Engineer
Brno, Czech Republic
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