[m-dev.] Version of Mercury to Compile Mercury

[Zoltan Somogyi]

On Tue, 23 Jun 2015 01:01:52 +1000, Mark Brown <mark at mercurylang.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 12:47 AM, Charles Shuller
> > I think that isn't recent enough because when I try to configure the code in
> > git it finds mmc just fine, but still errors out:
> >
> > looking for an already installed Mercury compiler to bootstrap with...
> > checking for mmc... /usr/local/bin/mmc
> > checking whether the above mmc works and is sufficiently recent... no
> > configure: error: You need a working Mercury compiler to bootstrap with
> 
> Make sure this one isn't in the part when you compile the ROTD.

He meant to write "make sure the out-of-date mmc is not in the PATH ...".

I have been thinking of a way to set things up that would make this simpler.
We could put a zero-size file into the source distribution (named something
like ".this_is_a_src_dist" or similar) to act as a flag. The configure script would
detect this, and ignore any installed mmc, out-of-date or not, to make sure
that the .c files supplied by the source distribution are not accidentally overwritten.
The last action of "make install" could be then to delete this file, if it exists.

What do people think?

Zoltan.