special note on building ivtools-0.6.11

A problem has come up in the transition to using a configure script for building ivtools. It should be fixed in ivtools-0.6.12, available by October 23rd 1998 at the latest. The workaround is to use the old-style configuration method described in the INSTALL file. If you have run the configure script already, you need to re-run it with no arguments before following the INSTALL directions, or start over from a fresh copy of the source tree. You also need to change the #if 0 near the end of the ivtools-0.6/config/site.def.$CPU file to #if 1 to bring back the definitions that were to be handled by the configure script instead. More details on the problem below.

The problem lies in compiling C source code (as opposed to C++) when using the configure script. Without the configure script, everything works fine for any gcc-2.7.2 installation, because with that version of gcc (any earlier version), there is full support for the -x argument (-xc, -xc++), which directs the plain vanilla gcc as to what language needs to be compiled.

With the configure script, all the C compilation is broken with any compiler (gcc-2.7.2 and <, gcc-2.8.1 and >, egcs-1.0.1 and >), because the default C++ compiler becomes "c++" instead of gcc, and even though the -xc++ argument still works on gcc-2.7.2 installations, the compilation had not been setup to provide an -xc whereever it was needed (the TIFF modules and the ComUtil library).

The fix forthcoming in ivtools-0.6.12 is to use the configure script to find a C compiler as well as a C++ compiler, and remove all use of -xc++ and -xc from the compilation command lines. This should work for gcc-2.7.2 (and <), gcc-2.8.1 (and >), and egcs-1.0.1 (and >).

The old-style configuration process will be modified as well, to add full support for a separate rule to compile C modules. That will get used in the ComUtil library. The TIFF modules always had a special rule to compile as C code, but that rule will be adjusted to make sure gcc gets used instead of a g++ or c++ specified by the configure script.


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