"sh boot" should give a better error message if automake isn't installed
I was building GHC from scratch on a new machine that didn't have automake installed, and sh boot gave the following error message: Can't exec "aclocal": No such file or directory at /usr/bin/autoreconf line 182. Use of uninitialized value in pattern match (m//) at /usr/bin/autoreconf line 18 2. Can't exec "automake": No such file or directory at /usr/bin/autoreconf line 183 . Use of uninitialized value in pattern match (m//) at /usr/bin/autoreconf line 18 3. (repeated five times)
It would be nice if the script checked whether automake was installed. Or, at least, maybe if the first attempt to use automake failed, there might be a way to avoid printing out the same error message five times; it's a little forbidding. (I'm sure the documentation says you need automake, but it might be nice to have a better error message even so.)
Trac metadata
| Trac field | Value |
|---|---|
| Version | 6.6.1 |
| Type | FeatureRequest |
| TypeOfFailure | OtherFailure |
| Priority | normal |
| Resolution | Unresolved |
| Component | Build System |
| Test case | |
| Differential revisions | |
| BlockedBy | |
| Related | |
| Blocking | |
| CC | |
| Operating system | |
| Architecture | Unknown |