Re: ./configure --with-installed-readline requires running make first

[Chet Ramey]

On 8/1/25 2:07 AM, Дилян Палаузов wrote:

Hello,

I have installed libreadline 8.3 on the system in a way that it links with 
libtinfow, so linking with termcap should not be necessary (but I am not 100% 
on the last).

OK. The bash configure still doesn't know that it's supposed to get the
termcap definitions from libtinfow.

In an out-of-source/VPATH build for bash 5.3 I do

cd dynamic && ../configure --without-bash-malloc --with-installed-readline

which emits:

checking which library has the termcap functions... using gnutermcap

configure cannot assume that the installed readline library has been linked
with a suitable version of termcap/tinfo/curses, so it has to check. In
your case, it doesn't find one, and falls back to using its own.

checking version of installed readline library... configure: WARNING: Could not 
test version of installed readline library.

Again.

and config.log contains:

configure:5741: result: using gnutermcap
configure:5774: checking version of installed readline library
configure:5833: gcc -o conftest -g -O2 -I/usr/local/include   -L./lib/termcap 
-L/usr/local/lib conftest.c  -lreadline ./lib/termcap/libtermcap.a >&5
/usr/local/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/15.1.0/../../../../x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/bin/ld:
 cannot find ./lib/termcap/libtermcap.a: No such file or directory
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
configure:5833: $? = 1

Of course, ./configure cannot link with  ./lib/termcap/libtermcap.a before make 
is run!

It does not normally need to. If you're using both a version of curses that
configure doesn't check for (where is libncursesw? you have libtinfow.)
*and* an already-installed version of readline which may or may not have
the ncurses library linked, configure is stuck.

You can tell configure to ignore the termcap library that's shipped with
bash by using --with-curses, but that will still look for -lncurses as a
default if it doesn't find anything else. That may or may not work for you.


--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    c...@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

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