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

[Toby White]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> * Toby White wrote on Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 12:03:33PM CEST:
> 
>>Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues at gmx.de> writes:
>>
>>>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.
> 
> 
> This sounds like a good culprit candidate.  Do you remember which shell
> this was on, and the exact configure script?  It'd be good to be able to
> reconstruct what triggered the trap and whether that is a shell bug or a
> configure.ac script bug or an Autoconf bug.

It was on a machine to which I no longer have access; but it was an old-ish
Digital Unix machine ...
Ah-ha - I've just realised that I emailed the mailing list at the time
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2004-07/msg00077.html

And it looks like I was misremembering slightly. There was also a buggy
compiler on that system, but it had nothing to do with the problem, which
was actually conftest.c disappearing, and as you probably saw when you 
searched earlier - it was all due to a buggy shell (very old bash version)
So - probably irrelevant; sorry.

Still - if you do have a magically disappearing file, I would try
and put some echo output into all the traps to see if it is a trap 
being triggered. Might lead you somewhere.

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