Re: [patch #8254] AX_BOOST_BASE: fix lib detection on multi-arch systems

[Peter Johansson]

Hi Cory,

On 12/13/2013 07:51 PM, Cory Fields wrote:
> (Subscribed to the list to reply, sorry for the formatting kludge here)
>
> > Libtool has code to figure out which dirs are in linkers search path. Perhaps 
> > we should borrow that code and let the linker tell us where to look for boost 
> > rather than patching for every packager.
> >
> > I don't mind this patch. On the contrary, but I'm just sharing what I though 
> > might be a better idea. Any thoughts?
> Sure, that would be much more reasonable than the current approach by
> the module. A more comprehensive fix, though, would require more time
> than I am able to spend on this. As far as I can tell, this patch
> guards against the only big change distro packagers are likely to make
> any time soon, so it should suffice for us.
>
> Fwiw, I've done an implementation of what you mentioned above before,
> which pretty much consists of invoking the linker with some dump
> option (-Wl,--print-map, -Wl,--trace, etc) and grepping the output, or
> probing the resulting object. I found it to be pretty sensitive to the
> compiler/linker used. Maybe libtool has a saner approach?

Yeah, I will look into the libtool code in more detail. It won't be on 
this side of the holidays though.
> Seems to me a simpler route would be to avoid trying to find the path
> entirely, and just link-test with -lboost_foo, -lboost_foo_mt, etc,
> until one hits. I assume there's some need for the path that precludes
> this more typical approach?

I was working on a patch like that early this year when I realized the 
library can be named all kind of funny things including compiler build 
triplets in the name. The combinations were just too many to enumerate, 
so I guess that's why original author chose the wild-card solution.


> Thanks for the quick and helpful response!

Thanks for catching this and taking the time to submit a patch.

Cheers,
Peter