Configure: error: cannot compute sizeof (int)

This article is a part of the Troubleshooting collection.

Problem

[root@box]# ./configure --with-user=amandabackup --with-group=disk
     [...]
checking size of int... configure: error: cannot compute sizeof (int)

Explanation

This is a follow-on error to problems with glib. Configure is trying to use the compiler to determine a simple system parameter (sizeof(int)), but the compiler flags added by the preceding glib detection are causing a failure.

This tends to happen on Solaris and AIX systems.

Solution

Check config.log. The file ends with three long sections of variables, before which is regular log output of compiler commands run. The last compiler invocation in this log section will show, in detail, what errors configure encountered.

How to fix those errors on your particular platform is an entirely different troubleshooting problem!