[erlang-questions] R16B03-1 installation glitch

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

I just downloaded the R16B03-1 source tarball,
unpacked it, and did './configure'.

Configure works out fairly quickly that this is a Mac OS X box
(it's running 10.7.5, in fact). 

checking build system type... x86_64-apple-darwin11.4.2
checking host system type... x86_64-apple-darwin11.4.2

[Why does it prefer gcc to clang in this environment?]

checking for sys/types.h... (cached) yes
checking for uid_t in sys/types.h... rm: conftest.dSYM: is a directory
...
checking whether gcc needs -traditional... rm: conftest.dSYM: is a directory
rm: conftest.dSYM: is a directory
...
checking for egrep... grep -E
checking for ANSI C header files... rm: conftest.dSYM: is a directory
rm: conftest.dSYM: is a directory
...
checking for getconf... getconf
checking for large file support CFLAGS... failed
configure: WARNING: Check for large file support flags failed; getconf failed
...
checking for ANSI C header files... rm: conftest.dSYM: is a directory
rm: conftest.dSYM: is a directory
yes
checking for sys/types.h... yes
...
checking for IP version 6 support... yes
checking for multicast support... rm: conftest.dSYM: is a directory


(A) Is there any environment in which gcc -g creates whatever.dSYM
    and whatever.dSYM is _not_ a directory?

(B) Apple's manual page for confstr(3) doesn't mention any
    supported values other than _CS_PATH.  However, if you
    can get __DARWIN_C_LEVEL >= 200112, a bunch of
    _CS_POSIX_V6_{ILP32,LP64,LPBIG}_OFF{32,64,BIG}_{CFLAGS,LDFLAGS,LIBS}
    thingies become visible.  They still don't work; confstr(3)
    says they are valid, but they're all empty strings.

    I don't believe Mac OS X has a compilation mode that _doesn't_
    support large files; __darwin_off_t is unconditionally 64 bits.