Here's the strangest thing I've seen for a while. I was tracking down why I could build Wine, but another guy on the same machine could only build a slightly broken Wine that gave the error Wine cannot find the FreeType font library. To enable Wine to use TrueType fonts please install a version of FreeType greater than or equal to 2.0.5. whenever you tried to use it.
The first clue was funny output from Wine's configure script, though it was hard to see until I diff'd against good output, and used cat -v to make invisible chars visible:
--- configure.log.good.txt 2005-10-20 10:57:21.000000000 -0700 +++ configure.log.bad.txt 2005-10-21 14:41:59.000000000 -0700 ... -checking for ldd... /usr/bin/ldd -checking for -lX11 soname... libX11.so.6 -checking for -lXext soname... libXext.so.6 ... +checking for ldd... /home/mmoss/bin/ldd +checking for -lX11 soname... libX11.so.6^[[0m +checking for -lXext soname... libXext.so.6^[[0m
And what's that funny ldd? And what are those escape sequences? Turns the ldd is one wrapped by acoc (http://www.caliban.org/ruby/acoc.shtml) which colorizes the output, which also explains the funny escape sequences. This error went away when we stopped using acoc to colorize the output of commands like ldd. We had been using acoc-0.5.2, but the latest version (0.7.1) also exhibits the problem.
I hope this helps somebody else who's scratching their head over strange build failures! - Dan