[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [patch] Startup readline segfault (PR#491)

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jacob Luna Lundberg <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Aug 2000, David Pfitzner wrote:

> > > but if so it might be nice
> > > to have the configure script look for that somehow.
> > 
> > Unfortunately that seems rather difficult :-(
> 
> Actually, the attached configure.in patch detects the problem and turns
> off readline support when it won't work (unless you override with
> --with-readline or you're cross-compiling).  It's a bit unclean because it
> uses AC_TRY_RUN() but that seemed unavoidable to me.

Right, I should have said:
"that seems rather difficult without using AC_TRY_RUN" 
:-)

But I agree that in this case using AC_TRY_RUN may be worthwhile.

So, thanks for that patch.  But:

- Once you start including code fragments in configure.in, I think
I prefer that a macro (preferably at least semi-general if possible)
be written and placed in acinclude.m4, and then called from 
configure.in.  (Run aclocal to generate aclocal.m4 from acinclude.m4.)

- Your check isn't actually ncurses specific - it tests whether 
readline works at runtime, and there could be various reasons for
that to fail.  So I would change the wording to, eg,
  AC_MSG_CHECKING(whether readline works at runtime)
etc

- The smily face confused my emacs about bracket matching!! :-)

- Worst, I got:

  checking whether readline hates ncurses... :-) no

even though readline _does_ (now) work fine on my system!  Oops.  
Also this leaves my terminal in a bad state (stty sane), so 
clearly something is going wrong...  But thats as far as I got 
just now...

Regards,
-- David