failing configure => dump config.log in the log

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 13, 2013, at 08:44, Akim Demaille wrote:

> So I would like to suggest that if configure fails, then
> find should be run to find all the possible config.log files,
> and dumps them.  This should address two concerns of Ryan's:
> if there is no config.log (because e.g., configure is not
> from Autoconf), everything is fine, and if there are several
> configure (e.g., when using AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS for subpackages),
> all the config.logs files are dump.

I asked Akim to start this discussion here.

We do have the problem that the config.log often holds the key to understanding a configure failure, and that users usually have to be asked to attach it, and be told how to locate it.

I worry that the config.log can be very large—and some ports like gettext have multiple configure scripts and thus multiple very large config.logs—and that including these in the main.log might make the main.log even more unwieldy.

Instead of printing the config.logs’ contents we could just print their locations and advise users to attach them to tickets, but that would be more work for users and wouldn’t help when we need to see the config.logs from a buildbot.

If we decide to do this for autotools config.logs, there’s probably a similar file we could use for when cmake is used instead of autotools.