[THRIFT-4109] Configure Script uses string comparison for versions

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Duplicate
• Affects Version/s: 0.10.0
• Fix Version/s: 0.11.0
• Component/s: Build Process
• Assignee: James E. King III
• Reporter: Devin Avery
• Created: 07/Mar/17 12:40
• Updated: 14/Dec/17 13:55
• Resolved: 05/Oct/17 03:25

Description

I am running the configure script as outlined here for MAC OSx -
http://thrift.apache.org/docs/install/os_x

I found that the configure script is doing string based comparison for
performing version verification which breaks as soon as a version changes from one digit to two. For example, homebrew installs ant version 1.10.x now (as of March 7th, 2017) which is clearly greater than 1.7 which thrift requires. However the thrift configure script fails to detect ant because it thinks the version is wrong.

This is because this line in the configure script (around line 18844 in
version 0.9.3) -

ANT_VALID=expr $($ANT -version 2>/dev/null | sed -n 's/.*version \([0-9\.]*\).*/\1/p') \>= 1.7`

Notice how you are using the >= which is STRING comparison, not version
comparison. When 1.10.1 compares to 1.7 it is considered LESS than instead
of greater than.

Issue Links

• duplicates: THRIFT-4232 ./configure does bad ant version check