[sugar] Cairo build autogen.sh fails is TERM=dumb in emacs shell window

Don Hopkins dhopkins
Sun Apr 29 11:04:39 EDT 2007


I ran across the following problem when trying to run "sugar-jhbuild 
build" in an Emacs shell window, whose terminal type was set to "dumb" 
by default:

When it tried to build Cairo and ran "./autogen.sh --prefix ...", that 
shell script returned immediately with an error code without producing 
any output.

The problem was on the line that went:

boldface="`tput bold 2>/dev/null`"

That was failing because the terminal type was set to "dumb".
Once I set the terminal type to "vt100" it worked, though.

Apparently "tset" fails if the terminal type does not support bold 
highlighting, which causes the autogen script to fail.

It looks like a lot of the different packages use "tput" in their 
autogen.sh scripts:
caio, dbus-glib, poppler, pyabiword, pycairo, pygobject, pygtk

Maybe it would be a  good idea to leave fragile useless bells and 
whistles like escape codes for terminal highlighting out of the 
configuration and build process.

    -Don




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