alex @3.5.1.0+universal: Error: cabal-prebuilt: unrecognized 'configure' option `--disable-dependency-tracking'

[alekitto (Alessandro Chitolina)]

Attempting to install alex on sonoma (14.4.1 apple silicon) results in a failure.

--->  Fetching archive for alex
--->  Attempting to fetch alex-3.5.1.0_0+haskell_cabal_use_prebuilt+universal.darwin_23.arm64-x86_64.tbz2 from https://packages.macports.org/alex
--->  Attempting to fetch alex-3.5.1.0_0+haskell_cabal_use_prebuilt+universal.darwin_23.arm64-x86_64.tbz2 from https://fra.de.packages.macports.org/alex
--->  Attempting to fetch alex-3.5.1.0_0+haskell_cabal_use_prebuilt+universal.darwin_23.arm64-x86_64.tbz2 from http://fco.it.packages.macports.org/alex
--->  Fetching distfiles for alex
--->  Attempting to fetch alex-3.5.1.0.tar.gz from https://hackage.haskell.org/package/alex-3.5.1.0
--->  Verifying checksums for alex
--->  Extracting alex
--->  Configuring alex
Error: Failed to configure alex: configure failure: command execution failed
Error: See /opt/local/var/macports/logs/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_macports_release_tarballs_ports_devel_alex/alex/main.log for details.
Error: Follow https://guide.macports.org/#project.tickets if you believe there is a bug.

Attaching main.log

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

:info:configure Error: cabal-prebuilt: unrecognized 'configure' option
:info:configure `--disable-dependency-tracking'

The solution will be to add configure.universal_args-delete --disable-dependency-tracking to the Portfile, or possibly to a portgroup it includes if this is a general problem for this type of software.

[essandess (Steve Smith)]

I see this too, but only on arm64.

Is this a bug in portconfigure.tcl?

We can add this line to the haskell_cabal PG, but that's just patching over whatever underlying issue exists in portconfigure.tcl.

cc: @jmroot, @ryandesign

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

That's not how you Cc people in Trac. (You add their GitHub handle or email address into the Cc field.)

I'm not aware of any underlying issue. portconfigure.tcl intentionally adds --disable-dependency-tracking to configure.universal_args. Autotools-based configure scripts understand this flag. When the universal variant is enabled, the contents of configure.universal_args are intentionally passed to the configure script along with configure.args. For ports that have a universal variant and use a non-autotools build system that doesn't understand this flag, the port must remove this flag as I showed above.

[kencu (Ken)]

at present, portconfigure.tcl adds the flag always

​https://github.com/macports/macports-base/blob/4dfabb9c0de9abfcbb4acf1ad68471b0a20983ab/src/port1.0/portconfigure.tcl#L319

and expects it to be removed if not needed/supported

the flag is only needed when doing one-pass multiarch builds with the autotools build system, which is still the most common kind of universal build I believe.

logic might someday be added to portconfigure.tcl to see what kind of build is happening and only add the flag when needed.