I received a bug report [1] that configure finished successfully, but that the C++ compiler was not found. I noticed that this is documented behaviour [2]: if AC_PROG_CXX doesn't find a C++ compiler, it falls back to g++ as a default.
I'm not sure why this behaviour was chosen; however, I think it's a bad idea. If configure runs to completion, people rightly expect that things will compile successfully. On modern GNU/Linux distributions, users may optionally not install the full GNU compiler collection; in such cases, having a configure script that fails to notice that there's no C++ compiler is annoying. I'm sure that for backwards compatibility, changing the default behaviour of the AC_PROG_CXX macro is not an option right now. However, it should be possible to make it accept a second parameter, or to provide an alternative version of this macro (say, AC_PROG_CXX_REQUIRED or some such) that allows to make it not exhibit this problematic behaviour. Thanks, [1] https://github.com/Fedict/eid-mw/issues/78 [2] https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/C_002b_002b-Compiler.html#C_002b_002b-Compiler -- Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!? -- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008 Hacklab
