Re: Current trunk fails to build on MS-Windows

[Gavin Smith]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 5:53 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> But the problems you mention here are already solved, see
> build-aux/missing.  And our Makefile's already call that script for
> the likes of autoconf, automake, help2man, and yes, even makeinfo.
> This is standard practice in the GNU project software and elsewhere.
>
> We could do the same with Gawk 4.x, if that's more acceptable than a
> configure-time test.
>
>> If we were to check for gawk in the configure script, would this be a
>> check on the output of "gawk --version"? It's often said that it's
>> better to check for the features one needs instead of a particular
>> version of a particular program. There might not be other Gawk/Awk
>> implementations than GNU Gawk that have the needed features, though.
>> (Same for a check on "makeinfo --version" for checks on the version of
>> Texinfo.)
>
> I think --version is sufficient in this case, as all of the features
> weer introduced in 4.0.

I had a look at the missing script and it decides that the tool has a
wrong version if it has exit status 63. This works for some tools like
automake and bison. A quick check of the Gawk manual didn't reveal any
way to check for the version when running. We could always create our
own "missing-gawk" script and set it to be the name of the gawk
program in the configure script if a suitable "gawk" isn't found.