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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

You can disable most of the unnecessary checks. For Fortran / other languages, I believe that's AC_LANG https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.63/h...

Unfortunately the defaults are what they are and many people don't care to fine tune their builds.

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No, OP was referencing a long-standing bug where libtool would force Fortran checks even in projects that didn't need it at all.

I never new it was a bug, I just assumed the Autotools was too complicated for most developers to configure it correctly.

I'm not familiar with that one and my searches are failing. Have you got a link?

This StackOverflow question references it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4292683/how-do-i-tell-au...

It took years for the GNU maintainers to publish a libtool that fixed this bug, and then years for libtool users to upgrade to the new version.

This is one of my other peeves with the whole GNU build system; they will have serious bugs, they will fix those serious bugs promptly, but then take years to publish a release with the bug fix. My favorite example is when a new version of GNU libc broke GNU m4, then they quickly updated GNU m4 to support the new GNU m4, but they didn't actually release their fix for years. So for something like 2 or 3 years, you literally had a situation where the latest GNU libc couldn't be used to compile the latest GNU m4.

I hate GNU so much.

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