Re: [Fink-beginners] 'unknown' gcc issue

[Alexander H. <ale...@gm...>]

On 7/9/13 6:47 AM, Reaves, Timothy wrote:
> It's not a symlink.  Every time I run xcode-select, the timestamp of the
> file changes, so perhaps it's copying the binary? Why isn't it -
> correctly - evaluating the output of 'gcc --version' instead of looking
> for a symlink?
>
>

I generally only keep one Xcode / CLI Tools version around, so maybe 
that's why I've never seen this.

A 'gcc --version' check is indeed made, but for historical reasons this 
is done only after first checking whether /usr/bin/gcc is a symlink.

My recollection is that at a particular OS version transition (10.2 -> 
10.3, perhaps), there was a situation where the 10.2 Developer Tools had 
a _real_ /usr/bin/gcc which was same version as the 10.3 Xcode compiler 
(symlinked to /usr/bin/gcc), but it wouldn't actually build stuff on 
10.3 because of changes in the headers and libraries.  The symlink test 
was a way to detect that situation, or if Installer.app didn't

The issue here is that the output is decoupled from what has actually 
gone on.  For whatever reason, it was decided to use a common error 
message for both the "not a symlink" and "symlink but incorrect version" 
tests.  You're seeing "unknown" in that output because that's the 
default value.

We've got a lot more tests in the code now to deal with OS upgrades and 
Xcode changes, so this symlink test can probably go away.
-- 
Alexander Hansen, Ph.D.
Fink User Liaison
My package updates: http://finkakh.wordpress.com/