Darwin universal binaries and LDFLAGS conundrum

[Martin-Gilles Lavoie]

Greetings

First, I'd like to apologize upfront for the sheer autoconf noob-ness  
this post might impose on vets possibly on this list. But as luck  
would have it, I seem to be stuck with the job of dealing with an  
autoconf.ac script of ours wich doesn't seem to want to play nice  
with the task at hand.

Full source code relating to the issue is available online at:

	http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/ 
index.html

To resume the problem, I need to build a Universal Binary (aka, PPC +  
i386) library of BerkeleyDB. Now, normally, this is a simple task but  
it seems Autoconfig is working against me.

At the strict minimum, I need to have the following flags set in the  
generated makefile:

	CFLAGS=		-c $(CPPFLAGS) -O3 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/ 
MacOSX10.4u.sdk -arch i386 -arch ppc
        LDFLAGS=        -Wl,-syslibroot,/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk

The problem is, whatever I set for LDFLAGS or CFLAGS in the .ac file  
passed to autoconf, the output Makefile is invariably stripped down  
to an empty LDFLAGS declaration and a CFLAGS devoid of the -isysroot  
and -arch parameters.

Now being new to autoconf, I suspected I was doing something really  
stupid until I stumbled onto this:

	http://www.nabble.com/Configure-Support-for-Mac-Universal-Builds- 
t3635358.html

So, it seems I'm not the only one having this problem. Sure enough,  
manually patching the resulting makefile actually produced the  
universal library I was expecting:

        > file .libs/libdb-4.5.a
        .libs/libdb-4.5.a: Mach-O fat file with 2 architectures
	.libs/libdb-4.5.a (for architecture i386):      current ar archive  
random library
        .libs/libdb-4.5.a (for architecture ppc):       current ar archive

So, a current workaround would be to tweak my build sequence to hack  
the proper settings using sed & awk but this somewhat defeats the  
purpose of running autoconf in the first place.

The question is, is this a known bug and/or is this on the radar of  
things to do for Autoconf?


Martin-Gilles Lavoie | Senior software developer | 514.905.8658
Oracle - Macintosh Native Desktop Client, Beehive
600, boul. de Maisonneuve West, Suite 1900 | Montréal (Québec)  H3A 3J2