strace requires gawk 4 but doesn't test for it

[Dmitry V. Levin]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 03:35:29PM -0500, DJ Delorie wrote:
> I recently tried to build strace on a system with gawk 3 (RHEL 6,
> specifically).  Configure tested for gawk, found it, ran mpers.awk,
> which failed... and silently ignored the failure.

The expected configure output in this case is

checking whether mpers.sh -m32 works... gawk: ./mpers.awk:42:   array_return = array[array_idx][array_member]
gawk: ./mpers.awk:42:                                  ^ syntax error
...
no

which I wouldn't call "silently ignored".

> The resulting
> strace was built but didn't function correctly.

Yes, if mpers.sh doesn't work for any reason, mpers support won't be
compiled and output of 64-bit strace for 32-bit processes will likely be
incorrect.

> The core problem is that gawk 3 doesn't support [][] multi-dimensional
> arrays at all.
> 
> Should gawk 3 be supported?

Given that gawk 4 is getting more widespread every year,
nobody is working on adding gawk 3 support to mpers.awk.

> If not, shouldn't configure check for
> multi-dimensional array support and fail if it's not found?

Do you suggest failing the build in this case?


-- 
ldv
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