Re: architecture tests

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Tom,

* tom fogal wrote on Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 11:09:22PM CEST:
> Hi all, I'm just wondering how I find out what architecture a
> particular user is on? I'm trying to write a macro to search for a
> particular library, and since it uses 'find' under the hood to search
> for a .so file, things break when trying on OS X (where I need to
> change it to search for .dylib)

Ouch.  Don't do that (use `find' to look for a library).
That is about as unreliable as I can imagine -- you have no idea whether
that library belongs to the system/arch in question or whether it is the
one the user wants.  This is just poking in the dark.  Besides, it is
very very much too expensive searching a whole directory tree for a
file!

If you must know during configure whether it exists or not, try to link
against it using AC_CHECK_LIB.  If you must be able to choose whether to
link against a shared library only, you can look at Bruno Haible's
macros from gettext (look at gnulib's `gettext' or `iconv' module to
find them), I'm not sure but believe that may help.  Alternatively,
Libtool's macros may be of help but may be overkill.

Autoconf Way[tm] of testing things is to try to emulate the later use as
closely as possible.  That way the tests are as reliable as possible
also on systems you have not encountered yet.

> On a vaguely related note, are the archives
> (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/) broken for anyone else?
> When I click in the 'Search String' field to enter my string, it seems
> as if the form is automatically submitted and I get
> 
> "Not Found
> 
> The requested URL /archive/html/>the main
> index</a>.</em><!--x-search-form--><form method= was not found on this
> server."

Yep, I see this as well.  webmasters or
http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?group=administration are good places to
report this.

Regards,
Ralf