[GRASSLIST:4446] Re: ./configure fails at curses.h

[Glynn Clements]

John Gillette wrote:

> I'm compiling Grass5.0.0 on "dist.sparc-sun-solaris2.7".
> For 5.0.0pre3, the config.status file shows that I ran
> the following:
>   ./configure --prefix=/scratch/grass5p3  --without-dbm  
>   --without-gd  --without-postgres --without-odbc --without-fftw 
> 
> On Grass5.0.0, configure fails at:
>   checking for shmat ... yes
>   checking for IceConnectionNumber in -lICE ... yes
>   checking for curses.h ... no
>   configure error: error: *** Unable to locate curses includes.
> 
> I don't think that this happened on pre3.
> 
> (BTW, /usr/include/curses.h is right there.)

Possible reasons include:

1. curses.h includes some other header which can't be found, causing
the test to fail.

2. Something in curses.h causes a warning to be generated, which will
cause the test to fail.

There have been reports of the curses.h check failing on Solaris 8
(SPARC) systems, due to warnings relating to wide characters. In this
case, the config.log file will contain warnings like:

/usr/include/widec.h:38: warning: `getwc' redefined
/usr/include/iso/wchar_iso.h:337: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
/usr/include/widec.h:39: warning: `putwc' redefined
/usr/include/iso/wchar_iso.h:340: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
/usr/include/widec.h:40: warning: `getwchar' redefined
/usr/include/iso/wchar_iso.h:338: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
/usr/include/widec.h:41: warning: `putwchar' redefined
/usr/include/iso/wchar_iso.h:341: warning: this is the location of the previous definition

This indicates breakage in the header files, e.g. an incompatible mix
of vendor-supplied headers and GNU headers, possibly due to a bad
installation of gcc.

It is possible to work around this problem by pre-defining CPPFLAGS to
disable warnings, e.g.:

For Bourne shell:
	CPPFLAGS=-w
	export CPPFLAGS
	./configure ...

For C shell:
	setenv CPPFLAGS -w
	./configure ...

In general, if a configure test fails, look in config.log for clues.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>