autoconf2.7 missing on scallywag?

[Jon Turney]

On 15/04/2025 16:41, Andrew Schulman via Cygwin-apps wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Apr 2025 18:24:15 -0400, in gmane.os.cygwin.applications
> Ken Brown wrote:
> 
>> I've had two packages fail to build on scallywag with the error message
>>
>>    *** ERROR: autoconf2.7 is required to build this package
>>
>> But cygport requires autoconf which requires autoconf2.7.  Any idea
>> what's going on?
>>
>> Ken
> 
> screen builds are also failing, with the same error.

Thanks for pointing this out.

I was finally was able to do a little digging into this:

So, firstly, autoconf2.7 is being installed, as the logs show.

However, autoconf is a perl script, and it seems that perl is exiting 
with code 127. stracing it just hangs.

This baffled me for a bit until the brain fog cleared: This is just what 
we expect when strace is sitting there with an dialog box from the 
Windows module loader (that nobody can see on the screen of the VM) due 
to an unresolved export.

So, it seems we were running the combination of cygwin-3.5.7-1 and 
perl-5.40.2-1, which won't work (because perl now makes used the "new in 
3.6.0" setproctitle API).

I've removed the cygwin=3.5.7-1 pin in scallywag, since the issue I was 
worried about there seems to have been imaginary.

Please try rerunning the builds now.



I wish there was a way to surface these kind of loader errors to the 
console, so these failures weren't so inscrutable, but last time I 
looked at it, that appeared to be impossible.

It would also be nice if we recorded a package's dependency on cygwin in 
a more sophisticated way (against the API level, I guess) so the 
depsolver would have the information to avoid these kind of breakages in 
the first place, but again SHTDI :(.