Re: Cannnot build nbd from git clone

[richard parkins <aleph0hpela-suse@yahoo.co.uk>]

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From: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
To: richard parkins <aleph0hpela-suse@yahoo.co.uk>; "nbd@other.debian.org" <nbd@other.debian.org>
Sent: Wednesday, 13 December 2017, 23:13
Subject: Re: Cannnot build nbd from git clone

Yep, that was autoreconf (well, aclocal run as part of autoreconf)
trying to tell you that it was building a corrupt configure file because
your development environment is incomplete.  Can we make the error
message a bit nicer than a corrupted configure file?  Probably.  (In
fact, if we were to use m4_pattern_forbid([AM_PATH_GLIB]) in
configure.ac, it would make failure to find the third-party library a
hard error that refuses to generate configure, rather than a soft error

that only shows up later during the run of ./configure).

Is there an autoconf macro to check that a particular file exists, and if not fail with a specified error message? If so, you could simply add a call to check if (ACLOCAL)/glib-2.0.m4 exists and tell the user to install glib2 development tools if it doesn't. In general, rather than than just reporting a problem, it's better to tell the user what to do to fix it - that reduces traffic on this list as well!

Richard