diffutils 2.8.1's configure breaks on IRIX 5.3 and others

[Georg Schwarz]

diffutils 2.8.1's configure relies on mkdir -p, if available, not
breaking on attempting to create an already existing directory. This is
actually being tested for at the beginning of configure, and the result
whether to use mkdir -p is stored in the as_mkdir_p variable.
However, when config.status is being invoked towards the end of the
configure process that variable does not seem to be passed properly.
At least this is what happens on IRIX 5.3, and it seems to be the case
at least on OSF as well (cf.
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/bug-gnu-utils/2003-05/msg00008.html), and
maybe it is the case on every platform where mkdir -p does not work as
described above.
The result is that configure fails because it tries to build existing
directories.

As a workaround I slightly modified configure by adding one line:

*** configure.orig      Sun Feb 29 21:12:19 2004
--- configure   Sun Feb 29 21:13:13 2004
***************
*** 14114,14119 ****
--- 14114,14120 ----
  # Compiler output produced by configure, useful for debugging
  # configure, is in config.log if it exists.
  
+ as_mkdir_p=$as_mkdir_p
  debug=false
  SHELL=\${CONFIG_SHELL-$SHELL}
  _ACEOF

Maybe other variables are also affected.


-- 
Georg Schwarz    http://home.pages.de/~schwarz/
 address@hidden     +49 177 8811442