[sr #108558] libtool nm test does not really work for W32 versions of nm

[Peter Rosin]

Follow-up Comment #1, sr #108558 (project libtool):

Thanks for the report.

Just a quick note, Cygwin is not affected. This happens on
MSYS/MinGW only. On Cygwin, the Windows (or should I say DOS?)
NUL device is never involved.

cygwin$ /bin/nm -B /dev/null
/bin/nm: Warning: '/dev/null' is not an ordinary file
cygwin$ /bin/i686-pc-mingw32-nm -B /dev/null
/bin/i686-pc-mingw32-nm: Warning: '/dev/null' is not an ordinary file

If you have native MinGW tools and run libtool from Cygwin
(i.e. if you are using a 'fake' or 'lying' cross setup, as
described in the libtool manual), the test check succeeds
like this:

cygwin$ /cygdrive/c/MinGW/mingw/bin/nm -B /dev/null
C:\mingw\bin\nm.exe: '/dev/null': No such file

But you are quite correct that the test falls over on MSYS:

msys$ /mingw/bin/nm -B /dev/null
msys$ echo $?
1

It would be easier to work around this if the native MinGW nm
reported some kind of error message involving 'NUL', so that
the case pattern could be extended. Granted, that would not fix
the bug for old tool chains, but the bug has existed for a very
long time and you can always work around it with an explicit
NM=... The alternative is for libtool use some other non-existant
or otherwise special file on MSYS, when it is trying to work out
if nm supports -B. I don't know what that file would be though,
and it always feels a little bit icky to special case things.

Cheers,
Peter

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