[PPL-devel] Re: conftest.cc disappearing in a misterious way

[Toby White]

Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues at gmx.de> writes:

> Hi Roberto,
>
> * Roberto Bagnara wrote on Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 06:46:40PM CEST:
>> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>> >You said you searched for this already: are all systems this happens on
>> >on win32?  Maybe some unrelated process keeps some file open or prevents
>> >writing to some file?  (just another wild guess though)
>> 
>> No, these seemed to be more or less system independent: Linux, FreeBSD,
>> Solaris, Cygwin, ...
>> I googled for "conftest.c: No such file".
>
> I now did that, too.  First thing: I find only one reference to
>   "conftest.cc: No such file"
> and while there are numerous such with conftest.c, reasons for failure
> are usually:

I don't know if this is ueful; but I came across a similar issue
some months ago with a configure script for Fortran, where conftest.f
was vanishing. The culprit turned out to be an errant trap which was
being triggered elsewhere, which specifically deleted conftest.*, but
somehow didn't stop the configure script proceeding.

The ultimate cause turned out to be a buggy compiler on the platform in
question - unfortunately I can't remember precisely the details of how
that resulted in the odd behaviour; but I do remember it being very
difficult to find, until I discovered the trap in question.


-- 
Dr. Toby White 
Dept. of Earth Sciences, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ. UK
Email: <tow21 at cam.ac.uk>