On Fri, Mar 02, 2012 at 10:31:54PM -0600, Robert Miles wrote: >On 3/2/2012 11:43 AM, Christopher Faylor wrote: >> On Fri, Mar 02, 2012 at 01:11:49AM -0600, Robert Miles wrote: >>> On 3/1/2012 1:38 PM, Jeremy Bopp wrote: >>>> On 03/01/2012 01:05 PM, Eric Blake wrote: >>>>> On 03/01/2012 10:53 AM, Matt Seitz (matseitz) wrote: >[snip] >>>>> I suspect not, but I would like to see such recommended and/or >>>>> suggested packages. Back when I was using Cygwin gcc so I could >>>>> learn C, m4 was not installed along with it, and I believe that m4 >>>>> should at least be shown as a recommended package to go along with >>>>> gcc. >>There is no reason to include m4 as a gcc dependency if you are trying >>to learn C. This would not even be a case of a suggestion. If you >>needed m4 for some reason (maybe for autoconf/automake) that really >>would be a case where you need to install m4 separately. You can use >>gcc quite happily without having m4 installed. >> >>For the record, I don't think Yaakov, Corinna, or I are really >>interested in spending our time adding some sort of suggestion >>mechanism to setup.exe. This would have ramifications both for >>setup.exe, for the script which updates setup.ini, and for the genini >>script. It would likely be a fair amount of work. >> >>Given the fact that this has come up repeatedly over the years I am >>pretty sure that repeated suggestions that setup.exe should be modified >>to do this are likely not going to have any effect. >> >The examples I used for learning C all used #include, and therefore >required m4 in order to compile. I believe gcc gave an error message >in this case showing what was missing, and therefore did not slow down >the learning process too much.
Sorry but m4 has nothing to do with #include. I don't doubt that you saw some error that mentioned m4 but it undoubtedly came from a package which used m4. gcc itself does not use m4 to expand #include. #include files are expanded by gcc automatically without the help of an external program like m4. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
