[Xastir] interesting shapefile experiment

[vic]

I have found something interesting that occurs during the ./configure process.
I have 2 boxes with linux installed.
Box "A" has Mandrake 9.0
Box "B" has Mandrake 9.1
I have not ever been able to get shapefiles to work on box "B" after doing a 
./configure and make and make install.

However if I do a ./configure on box "A" and copy all the files to box "B" and 
do a make and make install, everything works.

I have set up each box with identical external libs for xastir, namely only 
shapefile support from the 1.2.9 version, and nothing else. 

I have removed the bash shell from Mandrake 9.1 and installed the version 
running on Mandrake 9.0.

./configure writes to the screen identical output on each box. Namely 
shapefile support is available and the rest of the output is line for line 
and word for word identical on each box.

Other than running ./configure on 2 different version of OS everything was 
done identically, including using the same maps, map directories, permissions 
and running xastir as suid, in all cases.

I have come to the conclusion that ./configure does something I cannot see.

Having compiled the executable in each case ( the one that works and the one 
that does not work) on box "B", with the configure output (I assume config.h, 
config.status, and config.log,  the only difference) doesn't make sense to 
me...

This tells me that the compiler and the external lib's are probably okay,
something else very subtle is going on.

Copying config.status from the ./configure result of box "A" to the file 
structure of box "B" results in a perfectly working executable, so something 
in config.status is different between to the 2 boxes yet yields a good 
executable on the box which fails to produce a good config.status.

Anybody want to suggest where I look for the differences? Should I print out 
the config.status files of each and look for any differences or should I 
print out something else.  Will config.log show any differences?  I want to 
get to the bottom of this, as it may affect other machines as well.

Map indexing and all of that work perfectly. Just the shapefiles disappear 
when the indexing is done when running the executable built with the 
config.status from box "B". They re-appear when the executable is built on 
this same box "B", using config.status from box "A".

I would appreciate any suggestions as to where to look next.

Thanks,

Regards, Vic ke4lkq