[tex-live] tlmgr invokes cc on OS X

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Tue Nov 5 23:14:25 CET 2013


config.guess (and config.sub) is actively maintained (by Ben Elliston).
Just because he didn't answer once isn't enough reason to give up
forever; I correspond with him frequently.

So, to state the obvious, please write config-patches at gnu.org and cc me,
explaining the problem with the compiler situation.  Please also suggest
what should be done, since I doubt he will know off the top of his head.
Preferably also provide an actual patch that works for you.

Specifically, as already noted, there is code in config.guess for the
case where a compiler is not present (on darwin, and in general):
	if [ "$CC_FOR_BUILD" != 'no_compiler_found' ]; then

So you need to explain (to Ben, not me) why that is insufficient and
what to do.  If the issue is that Apple's useless stub is exiting
successfully, then maybe the it would work to check for a non-empty
$dummy.o resulting from the test compile.

As a separate issue, it would apparently also be nice to discuss with
Ben how config.guess's results on Macs could be improved in general.
Aside from the stub compiler breakage, I could not follow the ideas
being proposed, or not proposed, or what was wrong, or anything else.

I don't want to add more warts to our stuff to work around Apple issues.
(In fact, I'd like to get rid of the wart we have.  Maybe config.guess
could reliably detect our concept of x86_64-darwin, so that we don't
have to screw around with sw_vers and sysctl.  I'm not sure.)

If there is some reason why tlmgr needs to do something more that is
outside the design of config.guess (re Ben's reply about kernel
vs. userland), I need a comprehensible explanation.

karl


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