External Issue: [Documentation]: A scenario where Chapel is not compilable on Alpine Linux distributions despite following the installation instructions

Notifications Issues
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28293, "Yewzir", "[Documentation]: A scenario where Chapel is not compilable on Alpine Linux distributions despite following the installation instructions", "2026-01-11T15:07:44Z"

Summary of Problem

Description:

The package requirements for successful installation on Alpine Linux distributions are listed on this documentation page and repeated below:

sudo apk add gcc g++ m4 perl python3 python3-dev bash make gawk git cmake libunwind-dev
sudo apk add llvm-dev clang-dev clang-static llvm-static

Unfortunately, the configure script fails when called with the --prefix=<path> flag, due to the lack of a command named pathchk.

 => ERROR [builder 5/5] RUN ./configure --prefix=/usr
------
 > [builder 5/5] RUN ./configure --prefix=/usr:
0.339 ./configure: line 97: pathchk: command not found
0.339 error: invalid directory name for --prefix: /usr
------

This command is available after installing the coreutils package, which ultimately contains everything needed for a successful compilation.

 => ERROR [builder 4/4] RUN ./configure --prefix=/usr && false     # manual interrupt to demo
------
 > [builder 4/4] RUN ./configure --prefix=/usr && false:
0.744 Compiling Python scripts in util/
0.886
0.886   Currently selected Chapel configuration:
0.886
1.000 CHPL_TARGET_PLATFORM: linux64
1.000 CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER: gnu
1.000 CHPL_TARGET_ARCH: x86_64
1.000 CHPL_TARGET_CPU: native
1.000 CHPL_LOCALE_MODEL: flat
1.000 CHPL_COMM: none
1.000 CHPL_TASKS: qthreads
1.000 CHPL_LAUNCHER: none
1.000 CHPL_TIMERS: generic
1.000 CHPL_UNWIND: system
1.000 CHPL_TARGET_MEM: jemalloc
1.000 CHPL_ATOMICS: cstdlib
1.000 CHPL_GMP: none
1.000 CHPL_HWLOC: bundled
1.000 CHPL_RE2: none
1.000 CHPL_LLVM: unset
1.000 CHPL_AUX_FILESYS: none
1.012
1.012   Selected installation options:
1.012
1.012 PREFIX: /usr
1.012
1.012   To change the selected Chapel configuration, set environment variables.
1.012   See doc/rst/usingchapel/chplenv.rst
1.012   To change installation options, see ./configure --help
1.012
1.012   If the configuration above is appropriate, build Chapel with:
1.012
1.012 make
1.012
1.012   and possibly install it with
1.012
1.012 make install
1.012
1.012   Once Chapel is in your PATH, you can verify basic functionality with:
1.012
1.013 make check
1.013
------

The flaw was discovered in version 3.23 of the distribution and subsequently tested on versions 3.20, 3.21, and 3.22, both on tag 2.7.0 and on the main branch. Unfortunately, it didn't work anywhere.

Steps to Reproduce

Source Code:

For convenience, I won't have you compile the LLVM project first, only to discover that something is missing.

FROM alpine:3.20
# FROM alpine:3.21
# FROM alpine:3.22
# FROM alpine:3.23

ADD https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel.git /

RUN apk add --no-cache gcc g++ m4 perl python3 python3-dev bash make gawk git cmake libunwind-dev llvm-dev clang-dev clang-static llvm-static

RUN ./configure --prefix=/usr

Compile command:

N/A

Additional steps:

N/A

Associated Future Test(s):

N/A

Configuration Information

N/A