Re: architecture tests

[tom fogal]

 <address@hidden>Ralf Wildenhues writes:
>* 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!

Hrm, yes I was a little queasy with the approach, but I actually got it
from something in the AC archives -- ac_python_devel to be exact -- and
so I figured it wasn't \emph{too} bad. Mea culpa.

(ac_python devel is at:
http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/ac_python_devel.html
)

>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.

Actually I'm trying to find the appropriate -L<text> option to pass to
the compiler. Is there a smart way to do this via AC_CHECK_LIB? These
are paths that I don't expect will be in default compiler (err, linker)
search directories.

>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.

thanks for the heads up. as you can see, i'm quite new to all this!

>> On a vaguely related note, are the archives
>> (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/) broken for anyone else?
<snip>
>http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?group=administration are good places to
>report this.

welp, someone appears to have fixed it between now and then, thanks for
the link though.

-tom