On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 04:05, Chong Yidong <cyd@gnu.org> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
> Could you check if the latest pretest at
> ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-24.0.94.tar.gz
> still has the same problem?  Thanks.

Yes, 24.0.94 still exhibits the same problem.  I have looked more
closely into the output of configure (attached as
typescript.configure.gz and config.log.gz).  It appears to me that the
problem has to do with (n)curses: when configure is attempting to
determine which library contains tputs(3), it decides on ncurses (see
config.log:8457, configure:14331).  If you notice, the -lncurses
sticks around on various gcc lines for the rest of the configure run.

However on my system, what apparently happens is that gcc can
successfully compile a program with -lncurses but when the loader
attempts to actually run such an executable, ld.so is not able to open
the libncurses.so object and crashes.  See config.log:8655 for the
first instance of this, but it occurs many other times following.

It seems that some times configure compiles a test program (conftest)
with -lncurses and other times it omits this library.  Some times
configure merely checks the return status of gcc, and other times it
actually tries to run conftest, which may or may not fail.  Thus I get
a really screwed up configuration, and this crashing of conftest
results in "unknown" bit sizes.

FYI, Emacs 23 does not try to use ncurses, it links to
/usr/lib/libcurses.so.1, as demonstrated in the ldd.emacs23.gz
attachment.  Just in case something had changed in my libraries
recently, I configured and compiled a vanilla 23.3 Emacs....  It
configured, compiled, and runs just fine.

Chris