[ANNOUNCE] uClibc-0.9.30-rc2 released

[Rob Landley]

On Monday 20 October 2008 16:51:22 Bernhard Reutner-Fischer wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 04:17:06PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> >On Monday 20 October 2008 03:39:38 Natanael Copa wrote:
> >> On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 09:48 +0000, Vladimir Dronnikov wrote:
> >> > Still bison and flex (and evil gettext) binaries are must-pre-have on
> >> > the host system.
> >>
> >> You can do pretty much without gettext.
> >
> >To be specific, just about anything that uses gettext also has a
> > ./configure stage that detects its absence if it isn't installed.  The
> > same goes for libtool.
>
> binutils being the exception to that rule last time i looked.

Alas, binutils includes its own libtool, as a shell script.

I note that libtool is a complete NOP on any ELF linux system.  There's 
nothing for it to do.  The fact that libtool can't competently do _nothing_ 
without screwing up things like cross compiling is a damning indictment of 
the entire concept, if you ask me. 

The most recent time libtool broke for me, it was because I was feeding in the 
compiler flag "-static", which gcc understands but the libtool in binutils 
didn't.  It only understood its synonym "--static" with two dashes.

This took me rather a long time to track down:
http://landley.net/notes-2008.html#10-07-2008

> Not sure what the "missing" script is supposed to do, but it wasn't able
> to spare me providing a dummy help2man script (that's what missing is
> supposed to do, isn't it? Just touch the output).

Ah yes.  That.

http://landley.net/notes-2008.html#10-08-2008

Been there.  Done that.  Totally despise autoconf.

This is actually a binutils 2.18 bug (didn't happen in 2.17).  Here's the 
patch I came up with:

http://landley.net/hg/firmware/file/410/sources/patches/alt-binutils-2.18-screwinfo.patch

Note that this is a patch to add a patch to my build system.  Click "raw" in 
the upper right corner to download it.

Note the comment above the line: the "missing" script is SPECIFICALLY TESTING 
FOR THE MAKEINFO PACKAGE.  This file is totally non-generic, hardwired 
special case garbage of the worst kind.  (I.E. standard FSF code.)

Rob

(Yes, I actually do real work while puttering with FWL.  I beat my head 
against obscure bugs so you don't have to... :)