Latest CVS: small portability issues

[mouring at etoh.eviladmin.org]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Lutz Jaenicke wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 10:56:18AM -0500, mouring at etoh.eviladmin.org wrote:
> > On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Lutz Jaenicke wrote:
> > > I just run a test build of the latest CVS on HP-UX 10.20 and found two
> > > issues, both related to the new mdoc2man.pl support:
> > > - In Makefile.in, line 122, the construction
> > >   $(MANPAGES): %.out: %
> > >   is used. HP's "make" command does not understand this syntax (gmake does).
> >
> > This is part of the new rewrite of to provide manpages in multiple
> > formats.  Do you have a non-gnu suggestion?  I don't have an HP/UX near
> > me.
>
> "make" says:
>     Make: Don't know how to make %.out:.  Stop.
> So it seems that "%" is not supported at all.
> I have changed the construction to be similar to that of CONFIGFILES,
> patch is attached.
>

Hmm.. found a different bug.. but Yes.. I'll commit it.  Thanks.


> > > - In configure, the first "perl" command in the PATH seems to be found.
> > >   On HP-UX this is an ancient Perl-4, that cannot handle mdoc2man.pl.
> > >   I would recommend to try to detect a "perl5" in PATH first and only then
> > >   fall back to "perl" in the PATH.
> > >
> >
> > I'm unconfortable with guessing at which is the perl we want.  It's been
> > over two years since perl4 has been abandoned.  And I've not met very many
> > correctly written perl applications that won't work in perl 5.
> >
> > Maybe someone in perl4 should look at making it perl5/perl4 compatable
> > instead.
>
> I don't have the slightest clue about perl, so I don't know what it takes
> to make the script Perl-4 compatible...
> I have checked out some packages that require Perl-5 and they typically use
> a construct like
>   AC_CHECK_PROGS(PERL, perl5 perl)
> or
>   AC_PATH_PROGS(PERL, perl5 perl)

Ok.. I'll buy that.  I was not thinking about AC_PATH_PROGS.  I'll make
this change also.

Thanks.

- Ben