#49713: autoconf: generated configure scripts should not try to use nawk --------------------------+---------------------- Reporter: ryandesign@… | Owner: larryv@… Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: Normal | Milestone: Component: ports | Version: 2.3.99 Keywords: haspatch | Port: autoconf --------------------------+---------------------- autoconf generates configure scripts that, among other things, try to determine which awk implementation to use. It tries, in order, gawk, mawk, nawk and awk, and uses the first one that's found. gawk works well. I've never tried mawk but also never heard of any problems with it. But users who install nawk but do not have gawk installed have experienced numerous build failures of various ports. There are many prior tickets. In the past, I've fixed this by using the conflicts_build portgroup to add a build conflict with nawk. This is inconvenient for the user who actually wants to use nawk for their own work, because it requires them to deactivate nawk prior to building the port they requested and to reactivate it later. Lately, Josh has been fixing the problem a different way: by patching configure scripts to no longer try to use nawk. I've changed several ports today to use that method, but ran into a problem fixing graphviz, because graphviz uses autoreconf to regenerate its configure script, so even though I've patched it to not use nawk, it gets regenerated at configure time and then again will use nawk. Although not all ports fail to build when nawk is installed (for example, autoconf itself doesn't), enough do that I would like a more central solution for this issue. As a first step, I propose that the autoconf port be modified so that the configure scripts it generates no longer attempt to use nawk. I'm not aware of any benefit of trying to use nawk, and as I said I'm aware of many drawbacks. There are probably countless ports that fail to build with nawk that have not been reported; for example, I just fixed this problem in gdal today. By fixing the problem centrally in autoconf, we fix the problem for all ports using autoconf, and fixing other ports could become as easy as just having them run autoreconf (or, of course, manually writing a patchfile). -- Ticket URL: <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/49713> MacPorts <https://www.macports.org/> Ports system for OS X