Re: Error in compiling rcs and diffutils

() Costantino Carmignani <[email protected]>
() Sat, 21 Nov 2015 21:07:48 +0100

    configure : error : cannot run C compiled programs

   I am not so able to "decode" all the informations recorded in
   config.log.  I enclose the files config.log produced by
   diffutils and rcs

   May you give me some helps?

In both attached log files, we can search for this error message
and look backward to discover the context, trying to correlate
the lines we see in the log file w/ the messages we see as a
result of invoking ‘./configure’.  For example, in one of them,
we see:

 configure:4502: checking for C compiler default output file name
 configure:4504: result: a.out
 configure:4510: checking for suffix of executables
 configure:4517: gcc -o conftest    conftest.c  >&5
 configure:4521: $? = 0
 configure:4543: result: 
 configure:4565: checking whether we are cross compiling
 configure:4573: gcc -o conftest    conftest.c  >&5
 conftest.c:11:19: fatal error: stdio.h: No such file or directory
 compilation terminated.
 configure:4577: $? = 1
 configure:4584: ./conftest
 ./configure: line 4586: ./conftest: No such file or directory
 configure:4588: $? = 127
 configure:4595: error: in `/Users/costantinocarmignani/Downloads/diffutils-3.3':
 configure:4597: error: cannot run C compiled programs.

and indeed, part of the ‘./configure’ output does contain
"checking for C compiler default output file name: a.out".
That check apparently does not fail, and gives us a useful
answer.

So far, so good -- this correlation helps us to understand the
next part, where the check DOES fail.  What we see in the log
file lines between the successful check and the final error
message is a "fatal error" which mentions stdio.h, and
furthermore tells us that that file is missing or otherwise
unreadable.

All this is to say that we need to find out which package(s) on
those systems we must install to have access to stdio.h.  On
Debian systems, we can use ‘dpkg -S’:

 $ dpkg -S stdio.h
 libunistring-dev:i386: /usr/include/unistdio.h
 libstdc++6-4.4-dev: /usr/include/c++/4.4/tr1/stdio.h
 libstdc++6-4.7-dev: /usr/include/c++/4.7/tr1/stdio.h
 libglib2.0-dev: /usr/include/glib-2.0/glib/gstdio.h
 libc6-dev:i386: /usr/include/stdio.h
 libc6-dev:i386: /usr/include/i386-linux-gnu/bits/stdio.h
 perl: /usr/lib/perl/5.14.2/CORE/nostdio.h

Of these handful of packages, the one we need is the one
containing /usr/include/stdio.h, hence ‘libc6-dev’.  We should
make sure that package is installed and once sure, try back here
again, hopefully to get further along.

Overall, this troubleshooting process works on most platforms.

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen -----------------------------------------------
  (if you're human and you know it) read my lisp:
    (defun responsep (type via)
      (case type
        (technical (eq 'mailing-list via))
        ...))
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