can't compile xemacs21.5.28

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Uwe Brauer writes:
 > >>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen J Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:
 > 
 >    > Uwe Brauer writes:
 >    >> However when running configure
 >    >> 
 >    >> ./configure --with-mule --with-xim --with-xfs   --with-xim 
 >    >> 
 >    >> checking for Berkeley db.h... no
 >    >> 
 >    >> *** PANIC *** The C compiler can no longer build working executables.
 > 
 >    > Please post config.log (the whole thing, since IIRC sometimes it
 >    > executes many tests before actually trying the link that causes this
 >    > message).
 > 
 > It is huge

Actually, not by modern standards.  Word files have gotten smaller in
the last 5 years, but in the first few years of this millennium not a
few corporate intranets were taken to their knees by a couple of
people composing Christmas cards in Word and boradcasting them to the
whole company. :-)  Let's put it this way: see if you can find the
relevant part, which is

configure:37471: result: no
configure:38597: gcc -o conftest  -Wall -Wno-switch -Wundef -Wsign-compare -Wno-char-subscripts -Wpacked -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wshadow -Wmissing-declarations -Wmissing-prototypes -Wstrict-prototypes -g                conftest.c    -ltiff -ljpeg -lz -lXt -lXext -lX11   -lSM -lICE -ltermcap -lcurses -lasound -lm    -lutil  1>&5
conftest.c:205: warning: second argument of 'main' should be 'char **'
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -ltermcap
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

*without* using the words above in a search.  If that little task
doesn't appeal to you, well, that's why we spend few bytes of
bandwidth.  If it does, I'll let *you* do it for me in the future! :-)

Anyway, this looks like a bug in our configure script, but it will
take some time for me to find and fix it, and I don't know that
anybody else will get to it more quickly.  As a workaround, I gather
you're using a Debian derivative.  There is probably a "termcap"
package (the modern alternative is terminfo).  If you install that
this problem will go away.  It might be called "termcap-dev" or
"termcap-compat" or some such.  (These packages are just a small
wrapper around the terminfo library.)  It might also be part of the
ncurses family of packages on some distros, IIRC.