I made rpcgen a hard configure error. It never was one, and it should
not have become one - this reverses that.
tools/cygwin holds a checked-in copy of every file rpcgen produces:
form_x.h, fgl.h, menu_x.h, npcode.h, report.h and their _xdr.c
partners. They are not raw rpcgen output - they are hand-adapted to
compile with no RPC headers at all, defining bool_t themselves rather
than including <rpc/rpc.h>. That is exactly what a machine without
rpcgen needs, and it is how this built for years before rpcgen was on
anyone's dependency list.
common/dataio now generates when rpcgen is there and copies those files
when it is not. configure says which it is doing instead of stopping.
The error was an over-correction on my part. What actually broke on
Debian 13 was the ancient bundled RPC runtime headers under
tools/no_rpc/cygwin/rpc, where XDR_INLINE() returns long * while
rpcgen output declares int32_t * - a hard error with gcc 14. That is a
different directory and a different problem from the pre-generated
output in tools/cygwin, and the second was made to pay for the first.
The requirement also landed hardest on the people least able to satisfy
it: on RHEL 8, Alma and Rocky rpcgen lives in PowerTools, which is not
enabled by default, so the advice the error gave - "dnf install rpcgen"
- does not work as written. The notice now says
--enablerepo=powertools.
Verified in a container on the reporter's platform, AlmaLinux 8.10 with
glibc 2.28:
- with no rpcgen installed at all: configure and make both succeed,
and the resulting compiler builds and runs a 4GL program
- with rpcgen present, here on Debian: form_x.h is still generated
from form_x.x, and the end-to-end probes still pass
The pre-generated copies have drifted from the .x files - form_x.h is
missing FA_S_ALLOWEDCHARS, menu_x more than that. It does not break the
build, because the enum that matters reaches the code through
incl/dataio/form_x.xs.h, which xgen generates and which is versioned.
Worth refreshing, but it needs doing by hand to keep the no-RPC-headers
adaptation, so it is not being done blind here.
