A bare configure no longer works now that --enable-threadsafe is the default. This is suboptimal.

Yes please, we should have done this a long time ago. If you can make this work I'll buy you and the reviewers a beer (or a beverage of your choice) next time I'm in MV. Maybe more importantly, this may unbreak some fuzz tools like JSBugmon.

That's my thinking as well. Unfortunately, it's going to take me at least a week at my current rate of progress. I'm fine with m4 and make, I'm just not at all familiar with mozilla's particular build pidgin. Attached is a semi-functional prototype: it runs NSPR's configure and make out of SpiderMonkey's configure and make. I think the configure is okay enough as is, but the build is being triggered out of defaults::, which is probably not okay. Sadly, nspr's build step has to run before we can include pratom.h, so we can't do this like we do for libffi and libicu. Also, it does not yet set the right libs, so that has to be done manually. And make is still finding and depending on the installed nspr. And I think I broke --enable-ctypes somehow. And make seems to be rebuilding everything all the time with this. But otherwise it kinda works. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can take it from here because I'm down to really inefficient trial-and-error at this point and I'm sure to break other things if I keep fumbling about.

OK, let's try to find an owner. gps, would you be willing to take this?

I could probably review this if it's ready. glandium could deliver a higher quality review, however, as my knowledge on linking and system package subtleties pales in comparison to his.

I didn't know about this bug, but I ended up implementing it because I was having trouble getting Windows shell builds to work with manual nsprpub configure invocations, and glandium suggested doing this. Note that the default for the JS shell on posix platforms is now the posix emulation stuff, so this no longer matters for most people.